T D W I N AV I G AT O R

Predictive Analytics
By Fern Halper
TDWI NAVIGATOR PLATINUM SPONSORS
Contents
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

WHAT IS THE TDWI NAVIGATOR? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND OBSTACLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Use Cases for Predictive Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Value of Predictive Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

MARKET FORCES AND STATUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Adoption of Open Source Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Adoption and Cultural Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

MARKET LANDSCAPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Introduction to the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

Feature Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

VENDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

TDWI ANALYST VIEWPOINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Inclusion of a vendor, product, or service in TDWI research does not constitute an endorsement by TDWI or its management.
Sponsorship of a publication should not be construed as an endorsement of the organization or validation of its claims.

This report is based on independent research and represents TDWI’s findings; reader experience may differ. The information
contained in this report was obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication. Features and specifications can
and do change frequently; readers are encouraged to visit vendor websites for updated information. TDWI shall not be liable for any
omissions or errors in the information in this report.

TDWI publications are copyrighted material. Reproduction without express written permission of TDWI is prohibited.
 FOREWORD
Predictive analytics is on the verge of widespread adoption. Enterprises are extremely interested
in deploying predictive capabilities. In a recent TDWI survey about data science, about 35% of
respondents said they had already implemented predictive analytics in some way. In a 2017 TDWI
education survey, predictive analytics was the top analytics-related topic respondents wanted to learn
more about.
Predictive analytics is also a dynamic market. Commercial vendors are providing robust, UI-based
solutions for businesses. Numerous upstarts as well as established vendors offer open source solutions
for data scientists. Some vendors provide both. There is also momentum building around utilizing
different techniques for predictive analytics; for instance, machine learning and deep learning are
attracting considerable attention as disparate data volumes continue to grow.
There are a tremendous number of opportunities for organizations in these techniques—and
numerous challenges. Skills obstacles still abound and organizations are struggling to build talent.
There are cultural and technical issues, too.
TDWI’s new Navigator Reports build upon our rich history of research in data management, BI,
and advanced analytics to help our audience plot their routes through a particular market. The
reports provide readers with a greater understanding of what is going on in a specific market as
well as the players in that market. The reports use our primary and secondary research to educate
end users about a particular market and provide key metrics that assess its state. The reports also
include overviews of solution providers so readers know where to look as they begin adding to their
analytics arsenal.
In keeping with TDWI’s vendor neutrality policy, these reports do not rank vendors. However,
the companies profiled in the reports are included specifically because their products meet certain
criteria. These vendors include established leaders in the field as well as up-and-coming companies
that have something unique to offer.
Our inaugural report is on predictive analytics. I trust you will find it useful.

Fern Halper
Vice President, TDWI Research 

2 
 WHAT IS THE TDWI NAVIGATOR?
Most organizations now realize that they need data and analytics to be successful, and many organizations we speak with
are interested in growing their data and analytics capabilities. They have questions, though. They want to understand the
opportunities and the challenges others adopting the technology have faced. They want to understand where a technology is
heading and whether it is being adopted by their competitors. They also want to understand what vendors have to offer.
The goal of this TDWI Navigator Report is to help companies traverse a particular market by providing them with information
across three critical categories (see Figure 1):

1. MARKET OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES 2. MARKET FORCES AND STATUS

This category includes how others are using
the technology, the value they are obtaining
from it, and the challenges they are facing.
This information is useful on two fronts.
First, understanding use cases, value,
and opportunities can help an
organization understand whether
G
it should adopt a technology. LEN
AL
It can also be important to
This category includes three focus areas:
trends, adoption, and maturity. Trends are
significant in understanding the forces shaping
the market in order to determine what might
be important when starting or expanding a
technology project. Adoption is important
so organizations can learn where others
ES are with the technology and thus
become aware of whether they
M
are ahead of or behind
CH

AR

TRENDS VALUE
help “sell” the solution to their competitors.
KE
S&

T
ITIE

others in the organization. Because adoption also

FO
RCE
KET OPPORTUN

depends on culture, we
S & STATUS

Second, understanding examine that element in

MATURITY CHALLENGES
technology and this report, too. TDWI
organizational ADOPTION USE CASES has been measuring
challenges can help analytics maturity for
MAR

organizations know the past few years via

what to expect and our analytics maturity
perhaps help get assessments (see TDWI.
FEATURES VENDORS
ahead of issues before org/assessments), and these
they arise. results are key to learning more
MA E about a particular market. It is one
RKET
L A N D S CA P
thing to adopt a technology, but
another to be mature in it.

3. MARKET LANDSCAPE
Of course, it is important to understand the vendors that
provide solutions in a particular market. Who are they?
What kinds of customers do they target? What are their
unique differentiators? What features and functionalities
do they offer that are important for success?

FIGURE 1. TDWI Navigator Framework

3
 MARKET
and other quantitative staff, today data science is often the
realm of those who like to code using some of the open

OPPORTUNITIES
source technologies now available (such as R and Python).
This has helped to drive a new class of products that use
open source foundations and distribute analytics computing

AND OBSTACLES
tasks over many nodes in a compute cluster. It is a fast-
moving landscape.

Although it has been around for decades, predictive analytics USE CASES FOR PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
has been receiving significant market attention recently as
Companies are using predictive analytics across a range of
end users become increasingly interested in the value it can
disparate data types to achieve greater value. Companies
provide. A variety of market forces have joined to make the
are also looking to deploy predictive analytics against
growing interest in predictive analytics possible: an increase
their big data. Predictive analytics is being operationalized
in computing power (CPU and GPU) that makes it faster to
more frequently as part of a business process. It is being
perform iterative calculations; a better understanding of the
embedded in systems and applications. Some of the top use
value of the technology; vendors making their tools easier
cases include:
to use; the advent of big data; and the introduction of new
algorithms and open source options. • FRAUD. Many organizations are using predictive analytics
to predict fraudulent transactions. This runs the gamut
Predictive analytics is important because it changes the
from financial institutions predicting fraudulent credit
nature of analysis from reactive to proactive. BI does a good
card activity to utility companies determining fraudulent
job slicing and dicing data to help answer questions such
electricity usage. The IRS also uses predictive analytics to
as what happened or what is happening. It can also provide
identify tax fraud.
dashboards and visualizations for exploration. However,
it cannot estimate targets of interest (called outcomes or • RISK ANALYSIS. Risk analysis has many flavors. Financial
labels). These outcomes might include: Who will respond to institutions use predictive analytics to determine
a promotion? Who will drop my service? When will a piece portfolio and investment risk. Insurance companies
of equipment fail? Is that image cancer? Predictive analytics use it to predict future claim rates to price insurance.
opens new possibilities to answer business questions. In verticals such as healthcare, analysts are putting
predictive analytics to work to determine the risk of
Predictive analytics includes both statistical and
patients developing an infection or being readmitted to
computational science approaches such as those utilized in
a hospital. In education, predictive analytics is used to
machine learning. Over time, some of the practices in the
determine the risk of students not passing their classes
two fields have overlapped. For instance, both now include
and dropping out of school. Across multiple industries,
clustering. Some vendors that tout machine learning include
HR is employing predictive analytics to predict the risk
regression as part of their machine learning toolkit, although
of employee churn.
regression has its origins in statistics. Machine learning
techniques such as decision trees and neural networks have • CUSTOMER-RELATED ANALYTICS. Understanding customer
been used in predictive analytics for years. The important behavior is one of the most popular use cases for
point is that interest has grown as organizations analyze predictive analytics. This is true across industries.
ever-larger amounts of (often disparate) data. Likewise, sales and marketing departments are often
among the first users of predictive analytics. The use
In fact, big data has helped to fuel the excitement about
cases for customer-focused predictive analytics are wide
predictive analytics and some of the “newer” machine
and varied, including churn and retention analysis, up-
learning and deep learning hype. The rise of data science and
selling, next-best offer, customer sentiment, customer
the data scientist is, in many ways, an outgrowth of the need
loyalty, recommendation engines, and customer journey.
to analyze this big data. Data science is an interdisciplinary
field that extracts insights from data. Although traditional • PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE. Predictive maintenance, an
predictive modeling was performed primarily by statisticians Internet of Things (IoT) use case, is rapidly becoming

4 
 popular in predictive analytics. Here, data from
sensors and other devices is used to determine when
a part failure might occur. This can be accomplished
using predictive analytics and/or rules-based logic. For
instance, a manufacturer might use sensor data from
trucks to determine whether and when maintenance is
needed. The company could use analytics—for example,
a moving average of temperature from specific parts or
a predictive model that was built using historical data
of failed parts—to determine if there is a problem. The
predictive model would be embedded into a system and
operationalized to generate alerts or take automated
action when new data indicates a problem. This kind of
application is being used in many industries, including
oil and gas, utilities, manufacturing, healthcare devices,
and transportation.
• SMART APPLICATIONS. Machine learning is
being embedded into many applications, from
recommendation engines to dashboards. Predictive
analytics is also embedded into applications to support
new business models and intelligent applications.
Examples include dynamic pricing (eBay), digital
advertising, and smart consumer apps such as Pandora
and Waze.
Greater predictive analytics skill leads to greater overall analytics success.
High Degree Moderate Degree
58%
56%
38%
30%
12%
OVERALL USING PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS
FIGURE 2. Based on 150 respondents.
Source: 2017 Teams, Skills, and Budgets Survey.
5
THE VALUE OF PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Value can come in many forms, such as a benefit or an
increase of usefulness. Often, organizations need to sell the
value of a technology to their management before securing
buy-in.
For predictive analytics, value can include better decision
making, a stronger understanding of behavior, increased
insights, improved operational efficiencies, decreased risk,
reduced costs, or increased revenue. It is not necessarily
measured in ROI. For instance, in a 2014 TDWI study,
close to 40% of respondents reported not being required to
calculate ROI before deploying predictive analytics.
In a 2014 TDWI study, close to 40%
of respondents reported not being
required to calculate ROI before
deploying predictive analytics.
That said, there have been several studies that illustrate how
using analytics can measurably improve revenue. For example,
MIT researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
found that companies that utilize big data and analytics show
productivity rates and profitability that are 5% to 6% higher
Low Degree
56%
41%
6%
3%
EXPERTISE WITH
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
than those of their peers.1 TDWI has also seen that predictive
analytics does drive value. For instance, in that same
2014 study, 46% of respondents using predictive analytics
measured a top- or bottom-line impact (or both). Twenty-
eight percent believed they had become more effective or
efficient but had not specifically measured an impact, and
26% simply gained more insight. Not surprisingly, those
who have been using the technology longer are more likely to
measure impact.
More recently, a 2017 TDWI survey revealed respondents
using predictive analytics are more likely to state they have
had a higher degree of success with their analytics programs
than those who are not using the technology. As Figure
2 illustrates, there is an 8% increase in the high success
category for those who use predictive analytics compared to
the overall respondent pool.
Unsurprisingly, those organizations that identify their skill
with the technology as either intermediate or expert report an
even higher success (i.e., value) rate, 56% versus 30%.
In a 2017 TDWI study, 56% of
respondents who had expertise in
predictive analytics felt their overall
analytics program was successful.
TDWI research has also pointed to some best practices for
gaining value with predictive analytics. For instance, we’ve
seen that those organizations that use disparate data sources
as part of their predictive analytics activities are more likely to
measure value. Those that use a range of advanced analytics
techniques (such as text analytics or geospatial analytics)
together with their predictive activities are also more likely
to measure value. Those enterprises that operationalize their
analytics (so they can take action on the results) are also more
likely to measure value (see Figure 3).

1 SUPPLEMENT
2 SUPPLEMENT
3 OPERATIONALIZE
TRADITIONAL DATA PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS PREDICTIVE MODELS

Geospatial
Embed in applications
Text
NLP/Text analytics
In-database scoring
Geospatial
Optimization
Part of a business
Machine Data process
Streaming

FIGURE 3. Three steps for analytics value.

McAfee, A., and E. Brynjolfsson [2012]. “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” The Harvard Business Review, October.
1

https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution

6 
A GLOSSARY OF PREDICTIVE TERMINOLOGY

• PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS: Statistical, mathematical, and data-mining algorithms and techniques that
can be used on both structured and unstructured data to determine the probability of future
outcomes. Popular predictive analytics techniques include regression, classification, and clustering.
• MACHINE LEARNING: A kind of data analysis where systems learn from data to identify patterns
with minimal human intervention. The computer learns from examples using either supervised or
unsupervised approaches. In supervised learning, the system is given a target (or output or label)
of interest. The system is trained on these outcomes using various attributes (called features). In
unsupervised learning, there are no outcomes specified. Machine learning has been around for
decades; however, what has changed is the volume and diversity of data—as well as the compute
power to find insights in that data faster. Machine learning is often used in predictive analytics.
• DEEP LEARNING: A subset of machine learning that uses algorithms whose goal is to learn functions
that can classify complex patterns, such as images. Some deep learning algorithms, such as
artificial neural networks, have input nodes and a number of hidden layers that act as a kind
of “black box” to model one or more output nodes. Whereas early neural networks could not
recognize complex patterns, some algorithmic advances were made in the last decade or so and
those advancements, together with the availability of vast compute power, have made deep
learning feasible as well as more accurate than some thought possible. This has spurred greater
interest in deep learning for use in audio-, image-, and text-classification problems.
• DATA SCIENCE: An interdisciplinary field that extracts insights from data. Data science uses
predictive analytics techniques as well as other advanced analytics to find these insights. In many
ways, data science is an evolution of advanced analytics for analyzing big data. This has also
resulted in more computer scientists becoming involved in the process.
• CITIZEN DATA SCIENTIST: The next generation of statistical explorers, sometimes from nontraditional
backgrounds, who are variously self-taught, self-starting, self-sufficient, and self-service oriented.
These are often business analysts who may not have formal training in statistics or math.
• OPEN SOURCE: A collaborative development model where source code is made freely available while
the copyright holder retains the rights to study, change, or distribute the code. Open source is
popular because it offers a low-cost community of innovation that appeals to many data scientists
and application developers.
• PYTHON: An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented scripting language available through the
Python Foundation. Many developers favor Python because it is an easy-to-use, general-purpose
programming language with a number of libraries for analytics.
• R: A language and environment for statistical analysis, part of the GNU free software/open source
product. It includes data handling and storage facilities, a large set of tools for data analysis, and a
programming environment.

7
CHALLENGES
Although predictive analytics can provide significant value
for those organizations that use it, there are also obstacles to
overcome (Figure 4).
We consistently see in our research that lack of skills ranks at
the top of the list of obstacles for any kind of more advanced
analytics adoption. This includes a lack of skilled personnel
who understand the techniques and the technology. To
address skills issues, organizations often look to hire data
scientists as well as to train business analysts. Vendors offer
automated model-building tools, but TDWI believes it is
still important for users to have a basic understanding of the
techniques involved. There are numerous training options
available to meet different budgetary restrictions.
• ONLINE. Numerous online options are available for
those looking to understand certain techniques. TDWI
offers online training, as do other sites such as Coursera
and Dataversity. Some are free. Certificate options are
available through some of these sites. For those looking
for more in-depth training, there are many online
university options.
• ONSITE. Some educational organizations will come to a
company site to do training (TDWI does this). Some
What keeps organizations from adopting advanced and predictive analytics.
LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF
TECHNOLOGIES
LACK OF SKILLED ANALYTICS
PROFESSIONALS
LACK OF ENTERPRISE DATA ARCHITECTURE
DATA INTEGRATION
0%
FIGURE 4. Based on 352 respondents.
Source: 2016 TDWI Best Practices Report: Data Science and Big Data
8 
organizations that already have skilled personnel on
board may train from within.
• CONFERENCE-BASED TRAINING. There are also options
for external training. These are typically week-long
conferences that offer full-day or half-day classes. Boot
camps are also popular.
• VENDOR TRAINING. Vendors typically offer training on
predictive analytics and their toolsets.
Organizations cite a number of technical challenges related to
predictive and advanced analytics. One of the top challenges
is data integration. Most organizations have their data in
multiple data sources. They need a way to bring this data
together. Many of the vendors profiled in this Navigator
report provide tools to access disparate data sources as well
as tools for data preparation as part of their solution to help
analysts and data scientists. Some also provide functionality
for profiling data to assess its quality.
Another top technical obstacle that organizations face is the
lack of an enterprise data architecture—especially when
they are dealing with big data. Many organizations look to
modernize their data architecture for predictive analytics
because the data warehouse isn’t always the best place to
experiment with data or to build models. Additionally, if an
organization is dealing with big data, it may need to move
40%
40%
38%
34%
10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
to a distributed architecture to distribute the workload and
maintain performance. Organizations have adopted Hadoop,
appliances, in-memory analytics platforms, and the cloud as
part of their evolving architecture. Many of the products on
the market today allow the user to add their own analytics
into these platforms—to bring the analytics to the data.
Organizations should think about whether these potential
challenges will affect them and how they plan to deal with
them. TDWI provides a number of best practices reports to
help businesses think through some of these challenges.2
MARKET FORCES
AND STATUS
TRENDS
Although predictive analytics is not new, several recent
trends are important to understand when thinking about
implementing the technology. These developments impact
what vendors offer and how they offer it. These trends can
also influence what an organization chooses to deploy and
how it chooses to deploy it.
In some cases, the vendors are driving the trend; in others,
organizational needs are the driver. For some, it is both. Some
key trends include:
EASY-TO-BUILD MODELS VIA AUTOMATED MODEL BUILDING. Vendors
are always trying to make their tools easier to use. This is
evident from many of the visual UIs and wizards provided
with many commercial products. However, this has gone a
step further, driven by the skills gap in many organizations.
Because statisticians and data scientists are expensive and
often hard to come by, many organizations are trying to
build these skills internally. This has helped to give rise to
the “citizen data scientist” who often uses automated model
building found in some tools to “easily” build predictive
models. Here, the business analyst provides the tool with the
outcomes of interest and the attributes that might predict
that outcome. The tool builds the model and provides the
results. It is then up to the business analyst to interpret the
2
See TDWI Best Practices Reports on predictive analytics, big data, and data
science online at tdwi.org/bpreports. Also look at our Checklist series on big data
maturity at tdwi.org/checklists.
9
results and understand the model. Some of these tools are not
flexible enough for data scientists or statisticians who want
to select their own models to build and will want to iterate
on the model to make it more accurate. However, certain
vendors have provided various user interfaces, often referred
to as personas, for different kinds of users.
These easy-to-use tools are offered both on premises and
in the cloud, and are an option worth considering when
an organization starts to build predictive models. A few
caveats include the need for conducting proper training and
establishing control processes prior to any model going into
production to ensure there are no issues with it.
THE RISE OF OPEN SOURCE. Organizations are becoming
increasingly interested in open source technologies such
as R, Scala, and Python for predictive analytics because
most open source products have an active and innovative
user community, which appeals to many data scientists and
application developers. Open source tools are often adopted
by recent graduates entering the job market who were trained
on these tools and want to have a choice in the tools they use
on the job.
As such, the market is evolving to better support open source.
Some vendors provide commercialized open source solutions
as part of their predictive analytics offering—often in a data
science workbench environment. Others have opened their
proprietary GUI-based products to open source. For instance,
many vendors provide users with the capability of calling a
model built in an open source environment into their tools;
a few let users call commercial models from open source
tools. Some vendors even provide nodes on their visual GUI
interfaces for open source environments such as R or Python.
All that is required is that the users load these open source
environments onto their machines.
Open source options are important to consider because
of the range of functionality they can provide. That said,
when we asked respondents in a recent survey how they will
deliver on big data analytics projects, respondents were as
likely to use commercial software as they were to use open
source tools such as R. In many ways, it will depend on the
team. Data scientists tend to like open source programming
environments. Others may prefer commercial software with a
UI and full-feature functionality.
INCREASING MATURITY OF TOOLS. Predictive analytics tools are
generally becoming more mature in terms of the features
and functionality they provide as part of the overall analytics
life cycle—from data preparation to model building,
model management, and model updating. This maturity is
especially evident in traditional products, although a few
new vendors are also supporting the complete analytics life
cycle. These features include data preparation as well as model
management and monitoring.
Data preparation includes combining data sets as well as data
cleansing, feature selection (e.g., what attributes to use), and
feature transformation (e.g., calculating new features from
existing data). Model management and model updates are
important because organizations often lose track of their
models, which then go stale. This is especially true if there
are many models to monitor—and often companies have
hundreds or even thousands of models to manage. Vendors
are now offering tools and techniques to address such
problems and deal with the analytics life cycle including
model deployment (addressed below).
TDWI research indicates that models
can take an average of six to nine
months to deploy.
MODEL DEPLOYMENT. As more organizations take action on
predictive models, they often want to put these models into
production by operationalizing or embedding analytics into
systems and applications. Nevertheless, model deployment
is often one of the top two major stumbling blocks for
organizations implementing predictive analytics (the other
is posing the right question to model in the first place).
TDWI research indicates that, on average, models can
take about six to nine months to deploy, in part because of
politics or compliance issues. However, deployment is a key
consideration for predictive analytics and vendors are working
on ways to reduce this time.
Predictive Modeling Markup Language (PMML) is one
deployment standard, introduced in the late 1990s. It is
an XML-based interchange format that provides a way to
represent models in order to share them with systems and
applications. However, there are limitations with the standard.
Some vendors are supporting a new standard called Portable
Format for Analytics (PFA). Others are enabling deployment
using a language that is readable. For instance, some vendors
deploy models in C++ or C# so they can be deployed into a
SQL server as a native function. Some output in Java. Some
use a Web services model and support a REST API.
10 
The important point is that vendors are making the move to
support various deployment options to enable models to go
into production more smoothly. However, it is incumbent
on the organization to determine who is going to deploy the
models. Some organizations separate the duties—there are
builders of models and others who deploy and monitor them.
This often falls to IT or DevOps in larger organizations. The
key is that someone (or a group of someones) is assigned
responsibility.
MACHINE LEARNING AND DEEP LEARNING. Deep learning has
exploded in popularity because it provides accurate models
and can be used against structured data as well as with audio,
image, and text data. For example, deep learning is being
used in medicine to identify skin cancers. In financial services,
it is pushing the frontiers of fraud detection and being used
to detect money laundering. In security, it is used for image
recognition and threat detection. It is even being used to
analyze audio from engines to identify imminent part failure.
This trend is important because it opens up new use cases
and opportunities to use predictive analytics against large,
disparate data sets. Several open source deep learning
algorithms have also exploded on the market, including
MXNet, Google’s TensorFlow, and Berkeley’s Caffe.
DATA SCIENCE NOTEBOOKS. Notebooks take their cue from the
lab notebooks we are all familiar with from science class.
Notebooks (such as Jupyter’s popular offering) allow data
scientists to create and share documents that contain live
code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. Data
scientists like them because they can interact with the code.
The notebooks also provide a means for better note keeping
and collaboration. Some predictive analytics vendors are
providing support for notebooks, even as nodes in a visual
workflow. That said, other vendors are already building tools
that provide alternatives to notebooks.
AUTOMATION. Predictive analytics automation comes in several
flavors. There is automation of the model-building process
through a straightforward interface as we’ve described.
Another kind of automation includes the factory approach
to model building. Here the builder can put one model flow
together and then reuse that flow for other models. Often the
same model can be used against different model segments.
Automation can be used for model scheduling. Automation
can also occur in the model management process. Some tools
have features where a model builder can specify rules to alert
the organization that the model is degrading and needs to
be retrained. Other tools go further and automatically detect
model degradation based on lift or some other parameter.
Depending on your organization’s use cases, automation may
be quite important.
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT. Part of the shifting dynamics in
predictive analytics is moving towards building analytics-
driven applications. This is different than a statistician or
data scientist analyzing a data set using predictive analytics
tools and techniques to gain insight. Here, developers
build applications that use predictive analytics as a feature.
Examples include recommendation engines on websites,
predictive maintenance applications, customer service routing
(involving speech recognition), or finding the right match
in a dating app. Such applications will use APIs (application
programming interfaces) that abstract some of the complexity
of the technique so the developers do not necessarily need to
understand the algorithms.
This trend can have positive and negative effects. On the
one hand, intelligent applications can provide new business
opportunities. On the other hand, any predictive analytics
model put into production needs to be accurate and make
sense for the situation. That means that the developer needs
to have some understanding of the technology.
ADOPTION
Adoption refers to the acceptance and use of a technology in
a business. TDWI has been collecting data about predictive
analytics adoption since 2007. We have seen an increase in
adoption from approximately 21% in 2007 to about 40%
in 2016 (see Figure 5). This puts the technology in the early
mainstream stage of adoption.
TDWI has seen an increase in
predictive analytics adoption from
21% in 2007 to 40% in 2016.
Since 2013, we’ve seen consistent excitement about adopting
predictive analytics. When asked about plans to adopt the
technology in the next few years, generally about 40%–
50% of respondents who have not yet adopted predictive
analytics state that they plan to do so soon. However, given
that adoption rates have not increased dramatically since
2013 (when we first started asking the question), it appears
that organizations are struggling or just slow to adopt the
technology. This may be because mainstream buyers are
more cautious; many want to see that organizations similar

Predictive analytics use has doubled since 2007.

45%
40%
40%

35%

30%

25%
21%
20%

15%

10%

5%

0%
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

FIGURE 5. Based on approximately 300 respondents per survey.

(Results from 2007 include both full and partial implementations.)

11
to theirs have had success with a particular technology
before they take the plunge. However, they shouldn’t wait
too long or they will risk forfeiting the value that early
adopters have gained.
For any technology, some industries are more likely to be
early adopters than others. Not surprisingly, we are seeing
traction for predictive analytics in the following industries:
computer/networking (>50% of respondents), financial
services (>40%), insurance (>40%), telecommunications
(>50%), federal government (>30%), and software/Internet
companies (>35%). Over the past few years we have seen
an increase in the number of healthcare providers adopting
the technology as well (>35%). Popular use cases include
predicting hospital readmissions, population health and risk
analysis, and operations management. Recent advances in
machine learning and deep learning are paving the way for
medical predictions such as identifying cancers. That said,
there is still much room for growth in all of these industries.
ADOPTION OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS
We are also seeing growing interest in open source
technologies such as R and Python. Open source is
frequently the technology of choice at universities and the
go-to platform for data scientists. R and Python both have
predictive analytics/machine learning libraries. Other open
source options include Weka, KNIME, and RapidMiner. In
a 2016 TDWI survey, 38% of respondents felt that R would
The three most important tools for data science.
R 38%
Spark
Python 17%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20%
FIGURE 6. Based on 338 respondents.
Source: 2016 TDWI Best Practices Report: Data Science and Big Data
12 
be very important for data science in 2017; 17% felt that
Python would be a popular option (Figure 6). Many vendors
support open source options; most traditional commercial
vendors have opened their platforms to these tools.
ADOPTION AND CULTURAL ISSUES
Of course, much of the time it isn’t the technology
that causes businesses to struggle with adoption—it is
organizational culture that can stop an effort dead in its
tracks. TDWI has been collecting information about
cultural issues surrounding adoption for the past few years.
We’ve seen some minor progress, but there are still obstacles.
For instance, Figure 7 illustrates the responses of over
1,000 respondents about cultural issues around analytics.
Although 54% believe they can express analytics questions
in a way that shows value to executives and 43% believe that
analytics is a competitive differentiator, only 30% believe
their organization is data-driven. Additionally, only 30%
of respondents think their organization is able to deal with
analytics failures—yet experimentation and innovation with
analytics depend on them.
The companies we speak with say there is no silver bullet.
Getting the company on board often requires a combination
of having an executive with a vision, being persistent,
highlighting accomplishments, and most important,
building trust.
22%
25% 30% 35% 40%
 Organizational views on analytics still need to mature.
60% 56%
50%
40%
30%
30%
20%
10%
0%
BUSINESS WE ARE DATA-DRIVEN.
UNDERSTANDS
THE VALUE.
FIGURE 7. Based on 1,032 responses. (% agree/completely agree)
Source: TDWI Big Data Maturity Model
MATURITY
Whereas adoption looks at the percent of organizations using
a particular product, maturity examines how far along they
are with the technology. In terms of self-perception, many
organizations adopting predictive analytics believe they are
still relatively early in their deployments. For instance, in a
2017 TDWI survey with over 200 respondents, 44% felt they
were still in the beginner stage of predictive analytics and
28% felt they were at the intermediate or expert level. The
rest had not implemented the technology or didn’t know.
TDWI has been building maturity assessments since 2013.
Maturity in predictive analytics deals with the complete
analytics life cycle and is a combination of organizational
and technological maturity. Those organizations mature in
predictive analytics typically:
• MAKE USE OF DISPARATE DATA SOURCES. The vast majority
of organizations that build predictive models do so with
structured data. However, more mature organizations
often use disparate data sources such as text, geospatial,
or machine data in addition to structured data. They use
text analytics techniques to extract entities, concepts,
and sentiments from text data and use that as input to
predictive models. This kind of data can provide lift
to models. We’ve also seen that organizations that use
disparate data sources in analytics are more likely to
13
43%
30%
WE ACCEPT EARLY ANALYTICS IS A
FAILURE. DIFFERENTIATOR.
measure value than those that do not. These data sources
can enrich a data set and help provide more insight than
structured data alone. Many of the vendors profiled in
this Navigator report support disparate data types.
• OPERATIONALIZE PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS. Another sign of
maturity is the capability to operationalize or make
predictive models part of a business process. This can
be done in a number of ways, including in-database
scoring or embedding analytics into a system using
PMML, APIs, or Web services. The importance of
operationalizing models is that it helps to make them
actionable. For example, predictive analytics can be
embedded into a system to uncover fraudulent claims. In
this case, a predictive analytics model is built to predict
the probability that a claim is fraudulent using historical
data consisting of fraudulent and nonfraudulent claims.
That model is embedded into a system that scores new
claims for potential fraud. Those claims with a high
probability of fraud are routed to a special investigation
unit for further analysis. TDWI research indicates that
of those organizations with predictive analytics in place,
about half (50%) have also operationalized it as part of a
business process.
• MANAGE AND MONITOR MODELS. A key to success with
predictive analytics is the ability to manage and monitor
models. As noted in the Trends section, vendors are
 Model sharing with IT/DevOps is not very sophisticated.
EMAIL
SHARED FOLDERS
WEB SERVER
MODEL REGISTRY
0% 10% 20%
FIGURE 8. Based on 141 respondents.
Source: 2017 TDWI Best Practices Report: Advanced Analytics
working to make their software more complete and
mature. This often involves providing a model registry to
help keep track of the models. Several vendors profiled
in this report provide model registries and model
management capabilities. Yet we see only about 30%
of organizations that embed models into a business
process using a model registry (see Figure 8). Fifty-four
percent used shared folders, which is not an effective
way to manage models. Although IT or DevOps might
have its own plan in place to manage the models, it does
not appear that way from these results. In addition to
managing models, it is also important to monitor them
so they do not degrade. Buyers should look for solutions
that can manage and monitor models in production,
especially as the number of models increases.
MARKET
LANDSCAPE
INTRODUCTION TO THE LANDSCAPE
The predictive analytics solutions landscape is dynamic
and evolving. It is important to understand the different
approaches different vendors are taking to the market. Below
are five categories of vendor offerings. Some vendors fall into
14 
39%
54%
34%
29%
30% 40% 50% 60%
multiple categories; however, they are listed in Figure 9 in
terms of the category they best fit.
FULL LIFE CYCLE VENDORS. These vendors provide commercial
solutions for the complete analytics life cycle using their
own software. Many of these are robust solutions. They
typically have a visual UI that makes it easy to build models
using drag-and-drop. They can support automated model
building as well as reuse of these flows and some can scale to
support numerous models. Some of these have an integrated
approach to support structured data as well as text data.
Many of these vendors have opened up their platforms to
support open source. They have refactored their existing
algorithms to support a distributed big data model. These
platforms typically support multiple personas, including the
business analyst, the data scientist, and DevOps, via multiple
user interfaces.
BIG DATA/DATA SCIENCE WORKBENCHES. These are typically
newer entrants (although full life cycle vendors often offer a
workbench environment) that are predominately open source
and predominately focused on big data. The environment
typically supports big data and is script-based to support
R, Python, and other open source environments. These
platforms usually are targeted to the data scientist who codes
and likes to code. They may support notebooks or create
alternatives to notebook environments. Some vendors in this
segment have a particular focus on machine learning and
deep learning.
EASY TO USE/AUTOMATED. Whereas other vendor segments
support business analysts and data scientists, these vendors
target business users and business analysts. Their goal is to
provide easy-to-use tools that support predictive analytics
(although many full life cycle vendors also offer this; see
Figure 10 for the roles supported). This includes automating
the model-building process as well providing black-box
predictive analytics or predictive analytics embedded into the
application. Here, the business user might simply specify a
target variable of interest and receive the best model.
INTELLIGENT SOLUTION FOCUS. These vendors are more apt to
work with customers to build a solution using their own
FEATURE SETS
Organizations must consider numerous features when
evaluating solutions. The choice of vendors to put on a short
list will depend on the business problems the organization
is trying to solve, the skill set of the team, and the available
budget. Do you need a solution targeted to a data scientist or
to a business analyst? Will DevOps be involved?
15
proprietary algorithms. Often, these vendors began as
consulting companies or their technology tackled extremely
complex problems for specific industries, so it is best to have a
company representative work with the client.
API FOCUSED. These vendors offer a services approach to
applications that includes predictive analytics. These services
are typically APIs for easy consumption by developers and
data scientists. The vendor might provide machine learning
as a service or image classification as a service. Of course,
many of the vendors profiled offer APIs to put models into
production. The vendors in this category have a focus on
specific services. Details about each of these features are
found in the vendor profiles.
The roles of those using the product are also very important.
It would not make sense to purchase a data science work-
bench that primarily supports those who code in Python if
your average user is a business analyst.
Other considerations will include whether the organization is
dealing with big data, whether it intends to put models into
production and how it plans to do that, as well as how many
models it expects to deal with.
Here are some features that organizations need to consider
when embarking on a predictive analytics effort or building
out their solutions in the space.
HANDLING OF DATA SOURCES. Data comes in many shapes and
sizes and from multiple sources both internal and external to
the company. Some of the data will be stored in commercial
databases or in an on-premises data warehouse. Other data
might be in Hadoop. Some data might be in the public cloud.
Buyers should consider what data sources and platforms a
vendor supports and how it helps users access that data.
DATA PREPARATION. Data for predictive analytics will need to
potentially be merged and then prepared for analysis. This
may involve feature engineering, which includes profiling
the data for data quality as well as transforming and deriving
new variables for analysis. Feature engineering is extremely
important in predictive analytics. If your organization is
using disparate data such as text data, you may want the
solution to be able to extract entities, concepts, or sentiments
from text data to use for analysis. You may want to calculate
ratios or sums. Your organization may already have a data
preparation tool it likes. If not, it will be important to
understand what predictive analytics vendors have to offer in
terms of data preparation.
EASE OF USE. Does your organization require a visual user
interface or is it comfortable using a scripting language for
building models? Part of the answer will depend on who is
actually using the solution. Business analysts may be more at
home in a visual drag-and-drop or automated model-building
environment; data scientists might prefer a workbench.
BIG DATA SUPPORT. If your organization has large volumes of
data to analyze, it is important that the selected predictive
analytics solution meets certain performance criteria.
That means support for a distributed architecture. It also
means algorithms that can run fast on clusters in this new
environment.
MODEL DEPLOYMENT. It is one thing to create a model; it is
another thing to put it into production. If your organization
plans to put the model into production, it needs to
understand how the vendor supports deployment. How is
model export handled? How easy is it to embed models into
systems or applications?
MODEL MANAGEMENT. As the number of models increases, your
enterprise will need to keep track of them. Some vendors offer
registries or other tools to help with versioning. Some vendors
offer model-monitoring capabilities to track how model
16 
performance changes over time. This might include allowing
organizations to set rules or alerts if model performance
begins to degrade.
BREADTH AND DEPTH OF ALGORITHMS. There are numerous
predictive algorithms available in the market. Make sure that
the solution has the kinds of algorithms you need. For instance,
your organization might be very interested in deep learning or
it may have a specific need based on a vertical industry.
COLLABORATION. More often, organizations are building
teams to construct and deploy models. People often want to
collaborate. Some solutions have collaboration features that
can share models. Other organizations want to share the
output of the models with business users or provide them
with limited interactivity.
ON-PREMISES VERSUS CLOUD DEPLOYMENTS. Some solutions are
offered in the cloud; others are offered on premises. Some
solutions support both options.
SUPPORTS OPEN SOURCE. As mentioned, open source is
becoming popular as a low-cost option for predictive
analytics. Many of the vendors profiled in this report support
open source options such as R, Python, and Spark. Many also
support open source notebook environments such as Jupyter
notebooks.
EMBEDDING ANALYTICS. If you’re going to embed analytics as
part of a business process or in an application, you might also
be interested in how you can do that. Does the vendor use
PMML? Does it have APIs that easily enable you to connect?
Does the vendor provide in-database scoring?
FACTORY APPROACH. Some vendors offer a factory approach to
model building. That means that they enable reuse of model
workflows to scale up to thousands of models. This can be
important if you expect to have many models for different
groups or segments.
 Vendors
There are many vendors that provide predictive analytics capabilities. This section provides greater detail on the offerings of
the vendors shown in Figure 9. This should give readers starting off in predictive analytics or those building up predictive
capabilities with a good list of vendors to consider. The chart below describes the user personas each vendor supports in their
primary predictive analytics product.

Platinum Sponsor

DATA SCIENTIST BUSINESS ANALYST BUSINESS USER DEV/OPS

Alpine
Alteryx
Amazon
Angoss
Ayasdi
BigML
Cloudera
Cray
Dataiku
DataRobot
FICO
Fractal Analytics
H20.ai
IBM
Megaputer
Microsoft
OpenText
Oracle
Pentaho
Salesforce
SAP
SAS
Teradata
TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO Statistica

17
www.alpinedata.com
Alpine Data provides Chorus, a platform for managing Chorus 6.2, Alpine Data has integrated Python (Jupy-
the data science process from ETL to deployment. ter) notebooks into the platform to enable interactive
Geared primarily towards data scientists using big Python analysis from within the Chorus ecosystem.
data, the goal of the platform is to help enterprises Support for PySpark has also been added to interface
collaboratively build models using machine learning with RDDs in Python for distributed functionality.
techniques, and to deploy and govern these models.
Alpine Data also provides visual editing capabilities for
Focused on scale, the Chorus Parallel Workflow Engine ETL and analytics workflows, enabling business analysts
optimizes analytics workflows based on whether the without coding skills to access data and build models.
environment is Hadoop or in-database, taking advantage
of MapReduce, Spark, or SQL where appropriate. The
Distributed Execution Engine can push the code into
the data platform in parallel across a cluster. With

Alpine Data has found its groove in big data predictive analytics that runs
natively in Hadoop and Spark. Chorus adds collaboration and governance to
machine learning projects as well, which are important features. Chorus is
UPSHOT targeted to data scientists building scalable, big data models and provides
visual workflow capabilities for business analysts as well. It’s worth looking
into for organizations that have implemented a data warehouse and
Hadoop and want to take the next step to performing predictive analytics.

18 
Product Name Version Description

Alpine Data Chorus 6.2 Integrated analytics platform that brings machine learning, data, and people together to
create operational solutions for business users.

DATA PREPARATION Visual ETL workflow editor with hundreds of functions shipped out of the box; also partners with
CAPABILITIES Trifacta for data preparation.

Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, Pivotal Greenplum and HDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Teradata, HPE
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Vertica, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, AWS Redshift and EMR, Hive, and Impala.

Ships with multiple machine learning algorithms in the areas of classification, regression, clustering,
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
and dimensionality reduction; also supports Python and R libraries and provides an extensibility SDK
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
for adding new custom or open source algorithms.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Can schedule batch runs for retraining; includes audit trails and what Alpine calls “flow control” for
CAPABILITIES continuing or stopping flows depending on customized test conditions.

Supports deploying models as microservices that expose RESTful scoring APIs onto PaaS infrastructure
MODEL PRODUCTION/ such as Cloud Foundry, AWS, and Google Cloud platforms. In addition to PMML export for deployment,
EXPORT CAPABILITIES it supports the emerging Portable Format for Analytics (PFA) standard that can represent a broader set
of ETL and scoring functionality than PMML.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Supports model reuse via templating workflows with different variables.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises or in the cloud.

Licensing works on a per-seat basis based on four categories of roles, including analytics developer,
LICENSING
analyst, collaborator, and consumer.

19
www.alteryx.com
The Alteryx Analytics platform aims to accelerate the
selection, preparation, and transformation of data
for analysis, as well as to automate the process of
designing, testing, and publishing analytics models. A
seven-year-old company, Alteryx is probably best known
for its self-service data prep and blending technology;
its Alteryx Designer product enables users to perform
drag-and-drop joins on common data fields or geospatial
information without writing SQL, R, or Python, or
coding in Java and other languages.
Alteryx is more than just a self-service data-preparation
studio, however. It offers over 60 built-in tools for spatial
and R-based predictive analytics packaged as icons in
its platform that can be used in building workflows.
Alteryx also has a partnership with DataRobot that
enables joint customers to use its machine learning
algorithms as part of a workflow. For those who prefer
to code, Alteryx exposes a scripting facility (R Tool) that
analysts and data scientists can use to run R code within
the Alteryx environment.
Alteryx Server enables business analysts to publish
workflows to a private area for others to use and execute
at scheduled times to deliver analytics results throughout
an enterprise. It also offers the Alteryx Analytics Gallery,
a cloud-based resource for organizations to privately
share analytics without setting up a server, as well as a
public gallery that provides samples of analytics across
multiple vertical industries.

Well regarded for self-service data preparation, Alteryx now combines

these capabilities with advanced analytics (such as predictive analytics)
UPSHOT in one platform. Alteryx caters to two distinct user classes: technically savvy
line-of-business users—business analysts and power users—and
data scientists.

20 
Product Name Version Description

Alteryx Analytics 11.0 Self-service data analytics platform that allows analysts to prep, blend, and analyze data using a
repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale.

Includes tools for data cleansing, blending, data quality, binning and smoothing, data investigation,
DATA PREPARATION
data profiling, filter and search, transformations, aggregations, data parsing, CASS certification, and
CAPABILITIES
spatial matching.

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Alteryx supports a large number of data sources, including desktop, cloud, database, and Hadoop
sources. Connectors include Adobe Analytics, Tableau, Amazon S3, Azure Text Analytics, Google Ana-
lytics, Google Sheets, Foursquare, Marketo, Mongo, Salesforce, Sharepoint, and Twitter. Alteryx also
has relationships with third-party data providers such as Experian and Dun & Bradstreet, to enable
users to enrich their internal data.

Alteryx supports over 60 techniques for statistical, predictive, time-series, clustering, and prescriptive
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
analytics, with R as the underlying language performing the predictive capabilities, as well as integra-
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
tion with DataRobot for machine learning and automated modeling.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Once a model is built, it can be stored within a workflow in Alteryx Server, which includes version
CAPABILITIES control as well as access controls.

A model can be exported as an R model object or in PMML. A model can be packaged as a macro,
MODEL PRODUCTION/ an analytics application, or sent to a database that can be automated to run to drive downstream
EXPORT CAPABILITIES processes. Models can be shared via Alteryx Server. Supports in-database scoring for the Oracle, SQL
Server, and Teradata RDBMSs.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Once a workflow and models are created, they can be scheduled to automatically execute.

Alteryx Designer is a desktop-based deployment; Alteryx Server can be deployed on premises or in

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES the cloud via AWS and Azure. Alteryx Analytics Gallery is cloud-based and is managed and delivered
entirely in the cloud.

LICENSING Named user, subscription model.

*Written before the Yhat acquisition

21
aws.amazon.com/machine-learning
Amazon offers a host of services via Amazon Web
Services to help developers build applications. These
include storage, compute, database, and analytics.
The Amazon Machine Learning service makes tools
developed through the company’s internal R&D
available to developers to build “smart” applications
without in-depth knowledge of machine learning.
It includes three components: data analysis, model
training, and model evaluation. These are all provided
via a wizard interface.

Amazon Machine Learning provides automated model building for developers

assembling smart applications. For organizations that use Amazon cloud services
UPSHOT
and want to build applications that utilize basic machine learning techniques,
this is an option worth considering.

22 
Product Name Version Description

Amazon Machine Learning A service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology.
(AML)

DATA PREPARATION
Provides a data report to explore the data, find missing values.
CAPABILITIES

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Supports Amazon Redshift, RDS, S3, or CSV; can create models on up to 100 GB of data.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Binary classification, multiclass classification, regression.
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED

MODEL MANAGEMENT
Monitor prediction usage patterns with Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
CAPABILITIES

MODEL PRODUCTION/
Output to Amazon S3 or to applications that can read from S3.
EXPORT CAPABILITIES

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Model metadata can be queried for model reuse.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Amazon cloud only.

Model building based on compute rate of $0.42/hour; batch predictions: $0.10 per 1,000 predictions,
LICENSING rounded up to the next 1,000; real-time predictions: $0.0001 per prediction, rounded up to the
nearest penny plus a reservation charge.

23
www.angoss.com
Angoss provides a predictive analytics solution designed functionality in addition to advanced data mining,
for statisticians, data scientists, and business analysts. in-memory execution on Spark, in-place analysis of
The company believes that users need freedom of choice data in data lakes, and data access flexibility. Its server
in dealing with disparate data sources, predictive model and desktop platform, KnowledgeSTUDIO, provides
building, and deployment options. advanced data mining and predictive analytics for all
stages of the data mining cycle, including scorecard-
To that end, the Angoss suite of products supports a
building functionality.
visual drag-and-drop user interface as well as scripting
interfaces for open source tools, such as Python, R,
and Spark, and notebook environments. Its big data
platform, KnowledgeENTERPRISE, provides that

The company has made good use of the infusion of capital it received from its
parent, private equity firm Peterson Partners. Its solutions support the complete
analytics life cycle, and it has incorporated support for open source, even
including access to components such as Jupyter notebooks to embed custom
UPSHOT code and other machine learning packages directly within the visual workflow.

The platforms provide direct access from the Angoss workflow to visualization
tools such as Tableau and Qlik for reporting and multiple deployment options.
It is intended for customers across a multitude of industries and departments
(such as credit risk, fraud, marketing, sales, and CRM analytics), including teams
dealing with large volumes of data in distributed storage clusters.

24 
Product Name Version Description

Angoss KnowledgeENTER- 10.4 Data science platform integrated with Apache Spark to provide advanced data mining and
PRISE predictive analytics on large-scale distributed data structures.

Angoss KnowledgeSTUDIO 10.4 Advanced data mining and predictive analytics application for all phases of the model develop-
ment and deployment cycle including building repeatable workflows.

Angoss KnowledgeSEEKER 10.4 Fundamental data mining and predictive analytics software used for data exploration, decision-
tree analysis, predictive modeling with decision trees, and strategy development.

Wizards support joining, appending, and aggregating data sets, and removal of duplicate records.
Data profiling features help with data quality checks. Supports variable creation via multiple methods.
DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
Variable creation and transformation using Python is available in KnowledgeENTERPRISE. Data
preparation with SAS and in R and Python available in KnowledgeCORE.

Import and export data to and from text, Excel, SAS, SPSS, and R files; SAS and WPD data files can be
used directly in Angoss workflows (requires KnowledgeCORE license). Import and export data to and
from databases via ODBC. Also supports text analytics in KnowledgeREADER.
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
KnowledgeENTERPRISE supports data load from Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop ViewFs, Hadoop Archive,
Amazon S3, FTP, Network Shares, and other storage types supported by Spark. Data load from Hive
tables, text (CSV), Parquet, ORC, and Avro formats into Spark dataframes.

Supports numerous classifications, regression, clustering natively. Also supports R, Python, and Spark
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
libraries. Supports complex optimization in KnowledgeOPTIMIZER and segment-level optimization in
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
KnowledgeSTUDIO using Strategy Trees.

MODEL PRODUCTION/ Direct deployment within the Angoss application; Automatic generation of SAS, SQL, SPSS, PMML, and
EXPORT CAPABILITIES Java code for Angoss models for external deployment in other environments. Can run in-database.

Graphical UI with workflow design features; workflows can be reused. Models can be scheduled; In
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
KnowledgeENTERPRISE models can be scheduled to run on Spark.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On-premises or cloud deployment; physical or virtual environments.

LICENSING Desktop licenses node-locked to host machine. Multiple license types for server version.

25
www.ayasdi.com
Ayasdi’s mission is to design, develop, and deploy
intelligent applications. It uses a unique mathematical
approach called TDA (Topological Data Analysis)
developed at Stanford University to do this. Whereas
other techniques try to fit a line to a set of observations
or group them together, TDA looks at the shape of data.
This kind of analysis is useful for high-value problems
that involve complex and high-dimensional data that is
rapidly generated or constantly evolving. It is also useful
for signals that are hard to spot in big data. The Ayasdi
platform includes a scalable infrastructure built on
Hadoop for analyzing large amounts of data.
The company’s strategy is to sell discrete intelligent
applications that include explainable output (what
it calls justifiable). It has made inroads into financial
services, healthcare, and the public sector. Applications
include risk and credit monitoring, anti-money
laundering, clinical variation management, and
population risk prediction.

Ayasdi provides a math-based approach to solving complex analytics problems

and a way to explain and justify the results. Ultimately targeted to line-
UPSHOT
of-business users, developers can work with Ayasdi team members to put
intelligent applications into production.

26 
Product Name Version Description

Ayasdi 1.0 Ayasdi’s machine intelligence platform combines scalable computing and big data infrastruc-
ture with machine learning, statistical and geometric algorithms and Topological Data Analysis
to enable data scientists/analysts, domain experts, and business people to be more productive.

DATA PREPARATION Ayasdi works with ETL solution vendors; however, the company provides specific data transformation
CAPABILITIES tools that are often required by machine learning algorithms.

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED HDFS, ODBC databases, CSV, and flat files.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Segmentation, anomaly detection, prediction, recommendation, feature selection, time series, TDA,
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED model repair, and model justification.

MODEL MANAGEMENT
Supports champion/challenger model selection.
CAPABILITIES

MODEL PRODUCTION/
Model export through PMML or REST API (not publically available).
EXPORT CAPABILITIES

Ayasdi’s platform can be used in fully unsupervised, semi-supervised, and fully supervised modes.

• In the fully unsupervised mode, Ayasdi executes a large number of ML algorithms and combines
them together using TDA. This allows the system to surface insights and models from data
automatically.

• In semi-supervised mode, the system either needs to be given an objective to optimize or the list
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES of algorithms it cycles through can be restricted. In the former setting, the system cycles through
a vast number of algorithmic combinations which cleanly delineate the provided objective.

• In the fully supervised mode, the system needs both the algorithm selections as well as the
objective that’s being optimized.

Note that in all settings, the actual distributed execution of the algorithms is carried out automatically
by Ayasdi’s YARN scheduler.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises or via private or public cloud infrastructures.

LICENSING Licensed on an annual subscription basis.

27
www.BigML.com
BigML was founded in 2011 with the mission to make use BigML’s tools that include an API, bindings, and
machine learning available to everyone. BigML is offered WhizzML, the domain-specific language BigML has
as a cloud or on-premises service to analysts, developers, developed to automate any machine learning workflow.
and data scientists who are using the platform to build
The company also offers customized training, which
and deploy predictive models.
consists of four three-hour sessions capped off with a
The software is geared to everyone—even those new certification exam.
to machine learning. Its goal is to provide consumable,
exportable, programmable, and scalable machine
learning. Business users can make use of the web-based
UI to build models. Data scientists and developers can

With a nice, modern UI and the goal of democratizing machine learning, BigML is a
UPSHOT good example of next-generation machine learning-as-a-service, targeted to those
who need an easy to use machine learning tool or for those developing apps.

28 
Product Name Version Description

BigML Machine learning service that offers an easy-to-use interface and a RESTful API.

BigML offers a Lisp-like language called Flatline for feature engineering (https://github.com/
DATA PREPARATION
bigmlcom/flatline). In addition, imported source files can be manipulated in several ways through the
CAPABILITIES
API or web dashboard (e.g., filtering rows, dropping columns).

BigML can accept many file formats including CSV, HDFS, JSON, Google Cloud, S3, Dropbox,
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
and Azure.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Offers classification, regression, evaluations, clustering, anomaly detection, association modeling,
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED topic modeling (for text analysis).

MODEL MANAGEMENT
Models can be created, viewed, updated, and deleted through either the web UI or the API.
CAPABILITIES

MODEL PRODUCTION/ REST APIs are available for developers to deploy models into applications. Models can also be
EXPORT CAPABILITIES exported to Java, Python, Node.js, and Ruby code as well as Tableau or JSON format.

Scripts can be written in WhizzML, a domain-specific scripting language designed specifically for
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES building automatic machine learning workflows for repetitive tasks, or using the API plus bindings in
popular languages.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Can be deployed on AWS, Azure, or any other cloud, and can be deployed on premises as well.

Cloud version plans range from free to $10,000 a month, based on maximum data set size, maximum
LICENSING number of parallel tasks, and level of support. The on-premises version starts at $45,000/yr. for a
single server and goes up to $2.2M for a global installation plan for large enterprises.

29
www.cloudera.com
Cloudera, delivers an enterprise data management
and analytics platform called Cloudera Enterprise,
which is built on the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. The
company recently introduced Data Science Workbench
on Cloudera Enterprise, which is based on its 2016
acquisition of data science startup Sense.io. The goal
of the workbench is to provide the best data science
experience in the Hadoop ecosystem in a secure and
governable environment. The workbench provides data
preparation, visualizations, and model testing and
training on Hadoop, as well as tools to help put models
into production in a distributed ecosystem.
Data scientists can use R or Python to create models in
the workbench, which provides side-by-side program and
interpreter interfaces, negating the need for a notebook.
If a data scientist decides to use a notebook, it can be
zipped and included in the workbench. Everything done
in the interpreter is done in Spark. Additionally, the
Spark configuration files are those used in production,
which means that the models can be run easily in a
large-scale, distributed environment.

Cloudera continues to build on its expertise in big data to provide a platform

geared towards data scientists to help them to experiment and enrich code, all
UPSHOT within the Hadoop ecosystem. Worth considering if your organization needs a
secure platform for data scientists and is comfortable with open source tools for
the analytics life cycle.

30 
Product Name Version Description

Cloudera Data Science Data Science Workbench allows data scientists to use open source languages—including R,
Workbench Python, and Scala—and libraries on a secure enterprise platform with native Apache Spark
and Apache Hadoop integration.

DATA PREPARATION Apache Spark; any package that runs in R, Python, or Scala; commercial software certified with
CAPABILITIES Cloudera, such as Trifacta or Paxata.

HDFS, HBase, any data source with Spark connectivity (e.g., relational databases, NoSQL, NewSQL),
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
streaming data sources through Kafka and Spark Streaming.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Via R, Python and Scala libraries, including Spark; commercial partners certified with Cloudera.
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED

MODEL MANAGEMENT Version control performed via GitHub; models can be tracked via Cloudera Navigator; includes full
CAPABILITIES lineage to backtrace model.
MODEL PRODUCTION/ Uses Docker containers as an API endpoint to package up applications; Java, PMML, C, C++ available
EXPORT CAPABILITIES through Python and R packages (i.e., RPMML).

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Available through commercial partners certified with Cloudera, such as DataRobot.

CLOUD VS. ON-PREMISES Supports both.

LICENSING Available to licensees of Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub and Cloudera Data Science and Engineering.

31
www.cray.com
Cray, best known for its supercomputers, ranks
analytics as one of its main focus areas along with
high-performance computing. The company works with
researchers and scientists in government, defense, and
earth science—as well as commercial organizations—to
tackle large and complex simulation, analytics, and deep
learning problems. These include problems in industries
such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences, aerospace
and automotive manufacturing, oil and gas exploration,
financial services, and any business looking to drive
innovation on a large scale.
Recently, the company has put a major emphasis on
supporting machine learning and deep learning. Its goal
is to provide deep learning utilizing dense GPU and
CPU platforms, and open source tools and frameworks
for seamless customer access to these analytics. This
includes support for the end-to-end analytics work flow
including data preparation, feature extraction, data
collection, and monitoring.

Cray has a long history of pushing the limits of computing. Cray is worth looking
into for data scientists needing a flexible and scalable high-performance
UPSHOT
computing platform that supports deep learning for (ultimately) very large-scale
predictive analysis and advanced research and development.

32 
Product Name Version Description

Cray CS-Storm For organizations leveraging NVIDIA GPU accelerators in production-use machine learning.

Cray Urika-GX For CPU-based machine learning using Spark-based machine learning (MLLib) and deep learn-
ing (BigDL) tools.

Cray XC50 For large-scale data discovery and analytics using semantic databases.

Cray Graph Engine For GPU-based deep learning neural networks (frameworks like TensorFlow, Microsoft
Cognitive Toolkit).

DATA PREPARATION Customers can use any open source software (including Hadoop and Spark) or ISV tool that runs on
CAPABILITIES Linux.

Supports Hadoop and Spark on Cray Urika-GX and Spark on XC50, Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP),
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Apache Spark, and Cray Graph Engine.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Supports Spark MLlib or Python; also deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe 2,
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED and Microsoft CNTK may be used.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Cray has not pre-integrated any tool for model management; customers can use any open source or
CAPABILITIES ISV tool that runs on Linux.
MODEL PRODUCTION/
N/A
EXPORT CAPABILITIES

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Ad hoc or scheduled job scheduling with a Workload Manager.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Supports both (cloud hosting provided through a relationship with Markley).

LICENSING N/A

33
www.datarobot.com
DataRobot is a machine learning platform that
simplifies and accelerates the process of building, testing,
and deploying machine learning models in supervised-
learning scenarios. A company goal is to automate model
building for machine learning in order to open up the
technology to business analysts and other nontechnical
users. In addition, the company believes that automated
model building also frees data scientists to iterate and
deploy machine learning into business processes quickly.
To that end, the company has employed Kaggle data
scientists and baked their expertise into its software.
An analyst uploads data to DataRobot, which auto-
matically generates a list of “recipes”—i.e., prebuilt
workflows—ranked according to their accuracy,
DataRobot is geared to business analysts as well as data scientists and provides
UPSHOT automated model building in a Kaggle-like framework to produce the best
machine learning model.
34 
efficacy, and likely performance impact. Under the
hood, DataRobot runs the user-submitted data set
against a curated set of up to 40 preinstantiated recipes
developed by its own data scientists. The recipes leverage
open source algorithms from R, Python, TensorFlow,
and others. The “best models” are then displayed on a
leaderboard.
Models are shared and put into production via
REST API endpoints that users can embed in their
applications. Workflows are persisted in DataRobot’s
repository, which permits them to be shared with other
people, applications, or services. DataRobot runs on
AWS or on premises, which includes private cloud, bare
metal Linux, or the Hadoop environment.
Product Name Version Description

DataRobot 3.0 An enterprise machine learning platform that automates model building, testing,
and validation.

Data preprocessing (e.g., missing imputation, encoding, and tokenizing of text data) in addition to
DATA PREPARATION
model building and deployment; no built-in ETL capabilities; DataRobot also partners with Alteryx,
CAPABILITIES
which can provide other data preparation capabilities.

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED URL, ODBC, HDFS, local files, data frames in R or Python Pandas.

More than six supervised ML algorithms, including generalized linear models, decision trees, boosted
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS trees, random forests, and neural networks; support vector machines. Several preprocessing algo-
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED rithms, including encoding, missing imputation, and text mining capabilities. Open source algorithms
including R, Python, and TensorFlow are also supported.
Workflows can be stored within a project and multiple iterations of projects can be stored in a project
MODEL MANAGEMENT
management view. Each project can be named, tagged, copied, and shared. Alerts not currently
CAPABILITIES
available.
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT Model workflows are made available for prediction as REST API endpoints. Workflows can be persisted
CAPABILITIES to the DataRobot repository, shared with other users, and invoked by applications/services.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Automated model selection, training, tuning, and deployment.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Available on AWS or on premises.

Annual subscription license is based on the number of users and number of compute engines needed
LICENSING
to support concurrent use.

35
www.dataiku.com
Dataiku provides an end-to-end data science platform Dataiku built the platform to address a range of skills.
that includes data preparation, coding, visualization, For instance, the platform provides interfaces for data
modeling, and deployment capabilities. Geared towards scientists to manage data and craft models via a drag-
data science teams in midsized to large companies, the and-drop workflow or a notebook environment, and to
goal of the platform is two-fold. First, the platform is deploy them into production. Dataiku also provides an
designed to help data scientists and business analysts interface for noncoders to build a model by specifying
collaborate on the same project. Second, it provides target variables of interest.
APIs to help push models into production. The platform
was built with a UX and open source-friendly mindset
to connect with Hadoop, Python, and other newer
platforms. Typical predictive use cases that the company
supports include fraud, churn, marketing and sales
analytics, predictive maintenance, and forecasting.

A new entrant that addresses the complete predictive analytics lifecycle,

Dataiku’s platform is a good addition to the traditional vendor mix. While
UPSHOT targeted to data science teams at midsized and large companies looking for an
end-to-end platform, the platform also provides automated model building for
those not expert in predictive analytics.

36 
Product Name Version Description

Dataiku DSS 4.04 Collaborative data science software platform for teams of data scientists, data analysts, and
engineers to explore, prototype, build, and deliver their own data products.

DATA PREPARATION
Visual interface for data connectivity, cleansing, enriching, blending, and transformation.
CAPABILITIES

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Platform provides more than 25 connectors.

More than 10 supervised ML algorithms including ridge regression and random forest; unsupervised
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
approaches including k-means and spectral clustering. Also supports ML techniques in open source
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
libraries such as R and Python.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Dashboard monitoring—users can visualize models and see who created them, who contributed to
CAPABILITIES them, and what changes were made; can also synchronize. Users can also set customizable alerts.

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT Workflows can be bundled together using a REST API for deployment into applications. Also supports
CAPABILITIES in-database or in-cluster scoring—even on models that have been trained in-memory.

Models can be put into production via the automation node. Users can also retrain the model
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
automatically using fresh data.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises, but can also be on private cloud.

LICENSING On premises version only; yearly subscription model (price based on server and number of users).

37
www.fico.com
FICO offers a range of data analysis products aimed
at both data scientists and business analysts. The next
generation of its analytics tools is Analytics Workbench,
which FICO positions as a self-service platform for data
analysis. Its underpinnings are provided by the FICO
Decision Management Suite.
FICO Analytics Workbench consolidates FICO’s own
intellectual property, along with that from its acquisi-
tions of InfoCentricity and KarmaSphere. It leverages
open source technologies such as Apache Spark, Python,
and Scala (R will be supported in the next release). Users
can work in notebooks (based on Apache Zeppelin) that
allow them to interact with visualizations and syndicate
their work; in addition, notebooks provide access to
open source libraries, including scikit-learn and Spark
ML. FICO Analytics Workbench supports visual data
exploration and wrangling. Users build data preparation
workflows and save them as executable “recipes.”
Analytics Workbench provides a range of data analysis
tools, features, and capabilities. Self-service and ease-of-
use features include data visualization, binning libraries,
and decision trees; many sample notebooks are provided
via the FICO community. Analytics Workbench
leverages Spark as a parallel compute engine. The Spark
environment permits multimodel analysis of relational,
graph, and multimedia data, and also has built-in
engines for query processing, streaming analytics, and
machine learning.

FICO, perhaps best known for its market leading decision management products
in analytics, has a great deal of experience in predictive analytics. Its Analytics
UPSHOT
Workbench brings many FICO analytics capabilities together in one platform
geared for collaboration among business analysts and data scientists.

38 
Product Name Version Description

FICO Analytics Workbench 1.0 The next generation of FICO’s analytics toolkit, combining existing data science tools with open
source technologies into a single, cloud-ready, machine learning and decision science platform,
powered by Spark.

DATA PREPARATION Visual, self-service facilities for data connectivity, cleansing, enriching, and transformation. Also
CAPABILITIES includes a weight-of-evidence feature to assess signal strength in variables.

Point-and-click support for structured sources such as CSV and programmatic access to Hadoop, JSON,
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
XML, and Parquet formats from stores including Hadoop, HIVE, and S3.

Regression, binning libraries, strategy trees, random forests, boosted trees, and neural networks;
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
does not currently support text analytics. Also supports ML and AI techniques via open source libraries
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
in Python and Scala.

Management and monitoring of models is provided in FICO’s Decision Central (a separate product),
MODEL MANAGEMENT
which provides the ability to track and compare models and lineage information (e.g., authors,
CAPABILITIES
contributors, changes, etc.).

FICO Model Executors support automated deployment of PMML or SPLM (SAS Programming Language)
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
models as Web services. Also supports FSML, a proprietary XML format that can be deployed into
CAPABILITIES
FICO’s decision management applications. Zeppelin notebooks can be packaged for export, too.

Automated data profiling, auto-binning and auto generation of models. Decision Central offers
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
automated workflow for model management, supports tracking, validation, sign-off, and more.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Cloud service.

LICENSING SaaS licensing on a per-seat basis.

39
www.fractalanalytics.com
Fractal Analytics provides client-focused global analyt-
ics services for industries including CPG and retail,
hospitality, life sciences, healthcare, and financial
services. As the company has evolved, it has also built a
number of applications and workbenches for advanced
analytics including machine learning, deep learning, AI,
and NLP. These are now used by Fractal Analytics data
scientists as well as by company clients.
The core platform is the Centralized Analytics Platform
which uses a proprietary services architecture to scale
a wide range of solutions. The Fractal team develops
advanced math and science products, streamlines
process automation, and builds reusable components
by industry and solution area using the platform. The
platform also houses numerous out-of-the-box and
proprietary algorithms.

Best known for its expertise in data science and big data, Fractal Analytics is
best suited to large enterprises looking to build customer-focused predictive
UPSHOT solutions using an experienced and trusted partner. While clients may ultimately
use the Fractal Analytics platform on their own, they typically start by working
together with the Fractal Analytics team.

40 
Product Name Version Description

Fractal Centralized Analytics CAE is a unified, open-source and PCI-DSS-certified business analytics platform. The core is an
Platform (CAE) advanced workbench built on KNIME, integrated with R, Python, and SparkML libraries.

DATA PREPARATION
CAE has over 100 prebuilt modules to automate the processing and validation of the incoming data.
CAPABILITIES

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Cloudera, Hortonworks, Hive, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Teradata, SAP, MySQL, MS-SQL, AWS.

Prebuilt analytics include sentiment analysis using NLP and ML techniques; pricing and promotion
modeling; marketing mix modeling; over 35 advanced demand forecasting algorithms; driver analysis
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
using Bayesian belief networks; generalized text classification; assortment analysis and planning;
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
sales propensity modeling using random forests; key-value items analysis; product attribute mapping;
context extraction; churn propensity; and personality prediction.

Each client is set up as a separate instance with a model-versioning framework. There are automated
MODEL MANAGEMENT
jobs set up to monitor whether models need retraining and the ability for the models to self-learn
CAPABILITIES
based on new incoming data sets.

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
CAE uses open source standards and provides the ability to integrate with third-party applications.
CAPABILITIES

CAE runs automated validation checks on the statistical model outputs using rules to confirm their
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
validity.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises or in the cloud.

Fractal either provides analytics services using prebuilt solutions in CAE or commissions the entire
LICENSING CAE platform for the client; the client then uses the platform to build and deliver analytics solutions
within their organization.

41
www.h20.ai
H20.ai provides an open source AI platform with an
emphasis on enterprise transformation. The company’s
goal is to provide speed, accuracy, and model interpret-
ability for data scientists. It offers four products. The
core platform is H20—an in-memory distributed
machine learning platform that provides numerous
algorithms out of the box, refactored to support large
scale distributed environments. H2O was written from
scratch in Java in order to integrate with popular open
source products like Apache Hadoop and Spark.
H20.ai also offers Deep Water, which integrates open
source deep learning frameworks such as MXNet,
TensorFlow, and Caffe. Sparkling Water is an
integration with Spark. Steam is used to deploy models
into production. These are integrated into the H20
user interface.
The H20 UI is script-based. H20.ai also offers
H20Flow—a visual interface to help users interpret
model results. Models are designed to have a small
footprint and can be exported as code or Java data
objects (MOJO, POJO) and embedded in various
environments, including in streams. The small footprint
of the models also makes them suitable for embedding
in IoT-related devices.

For use by data scientists who are comfortable working with open-source
analytics and need a way to put open source into production at enterprise scale,
UPSHOT H20.ai provides best-of-breed open source technologies in one platform. It also
provides tooling to support visualization of models and operationalizing them.
Finally, since H20 is open source, it is free unless support is needed.

42 
Product Name Version Description

H20 3 An in-memory open source distributed machine learning platform with visual intelligence
(H20 Flow).

DATA PREPARATION R users can use data.table for joins. Other data preparation features are available through
CAPABILITIES R and Python.

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Supports a range of data sources including Hadoop, S3, SQL-based, and NoSQL.

Offers statistical analysis, ensembles, deep neural networks, clustering, dimensionality reduction,
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS and anomaly detection, as well as feed-forward deep learning. H20 Deep Water provides open source
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe. H20 can also be used inside of R,
Python, and Scala.

MODEL MANAGEMENT
Steam provides cataloging features. No versioning in current release.
CAPABILITIES

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
Via Steam, users can export lightweight models as MOJO or POJO objects.
CAPABILITIES

Provides AutoML to automate parts of data preparation and model development including aspects of
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
data cleansing, feature engineering, feature selection, ensemble generation.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Can support both.

All products are open source with Apache V2 licensing. Licensing based on level of support and data
LICENSING
volume. Steam AGPL license geared towards production models.

43
www.ibm.com
IBM has a broad range of capabilities for advanced IBM also offers DSX which provides popular open
analytics; its main predictive analytics products are source tools such as R, Python, Spark, and Scala—as
IBM SPSS Modeler and the Data Science Experience well as various notebooks—together in one place to
(DSX). The company’s predictive analytics strategy is help data scientists be productive. The big focus is on
about simplicity without sacrifice. SPSS enables business collaboration. Inside DSX, users can share assets such
analysts and data scientists to utilize disparate data as data sets between projects to facilitate collaborative
types such as structured, unstructured, and streaming development of analytics.
data; prepare the data for analysis; build models; and
deploy them into operational systems—all using a
code-free, visual GUI. It also includes support for R and
Python in workflows.

IBM is a long-time leader in predictive analytics. Built to scale, IBM SPSS

Modeler is a comprehensive, full life cycle analytics platform that supports data
UPSHOT
scientists, business analysts, and DevOps. DSX provides capabilities for coding
data scientists.

44 
Product Name Version Description

IBM SPSS Modeler 18 Predictive analytics platform that provides a range of advanced algorithms and techniques.

Collaboration and 8 Enables the deployment and sharing of predictive analytics across the enterprise including
Deployment Services centralized storage and capabilities for management and control.

DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
SPSS Modeler offers features to merge, join, filter, and transform data for modeling. SPSS Statistics
can be used to generate and implement statistical transformations. SPSS also offers pure ETL tools
that make it easy to access, transform, and load data back into a database (with SQL Pushback) or
Hadoop using IBM SPSS Analytic Server.
SPSS supports flat files, Greenplum databases, BigInsights and MapR (both via SPSS Analytic Server
and BigSQL), Cloudera, other IBM products and databases, Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, Teradata, Sybase,
Salesforce, XML, and PDF.

SPSS supports random tree, neural network, KNN, linear and logistic regression, general linear
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS methods, support vector methods, Bayesian networks, decision tree modeling and rule set building
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED using CHAID, QUEST, C5.0, and C&R, Cox regression, anomaly detection, TwoStep clustering, Monte
Carlo simulations, fit, and evaluation. SPSS supports open source environments in Modeler and DSX.

SPSS Collaboration & Deployment Services (C&DS) provides a repository with full versioning, audit
MODEL MANAGEMENT data, automated model evaluation, automated model refresh, and automated model deployment, as
CAPABILITIES well as full logging and governance support. It also supports notification options should users wish to
require human review of new or refreshed models prior to moving models into production.
SPSS models are encapsulated in a “golden nugget” in the software and can be added to any Modeler
flow. The entire Modeler program to prepare data for scoring (as well as the scoring of the model itself)
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
can be deployed either in batches or real time (via web service calls to REST APIs); SPSS also supports
CAPABILITIES
PMML. In-database deployment with DB2, Teradata, and Netezza. Deployments to Oracle and SQL
Server are also possible albeit to a more limited extent.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES SPSS automatically picks best model.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises or in SoftLayer, Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud platforms.

LICENSING SPSS is available in perpetual, term, or monthly options.

45
http://www.megaputer.com/
Megaputer’s focus is to provide customers with
knowledge based on the analysis of structured and
unstructured data. The company’s flagship product
is PolyAnalyst, an integrated analytics platform that
permits joint analysis of this data. The PolyAnalyst
environment integrates data preparation, coding,
visualization, modeling, and deployment capabilities.
It includes strong text analytics functionality such as
feature extraction, semantic analysis, entity resolution,
sentiment analysis, and classification/categorization,
along with more advanced features such as the ability to
perform deep linguistic text parsing.
PolyAnalyst is designed for use by data scientists/
statisticians and business analysts. To this end,
PolyAnalyst exposes an interactive drag-and-drop UI.
PolyAnalyst can be deployed on a standalone basis or in
the context of Hadoop or Spark, where it can leverage
available open source libraries and algorithms such as
R and Python. Because the PolyAnalyst UI supports
drag-and-drop operations in Hadoop or Spark, users
don’t have to write Java, Scala, or Python code.
In addition to PolyAnalyst, Megaputer markets a range
of domain-specific analytical solutions, with a particular
focus on the insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare
verticals. The company often works as a partner with
its clients, using its own data analysis consultants to
help customers build custom analytics solutions on its
platform.

Geared towards data analysts and data scientists, Megaputer provides advanced
text analytics capabilities that can be used to turn text data into structured data for
UPSHOT
predictive analytics. Worth looking at for those who want to combine multiple data
types in one platform as well as for those looking for solutions that require this.

46 
Product Name Version Description

Megaputer PolyAnalyst 6 Integrated data analysis platform that supports both structured and unstructured data.

DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
PolyAnalyst provides a layer of data cleansing, manipulation, and transformation as well as text
analytics features.
PolyAnalyst supports JDBC, ODBC, and OLE, Hadoop (HDFS, Hive), XML, JSON, Internet sources, email
servers, and social media (e.g., WebHose, BrandWatch), SDL SM2, SPSS, flat files, Excel, and a range of
text document formats including email and RSS feeds. The product currently supports 16 languages,
including English, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

For data analysis, supports prediction, affinity, classification, regression, clustering, segmentation,
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS neural networks. For text mining, supports feature extraction, semantic analysis, entity resolution,
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED classification/categorization, and deep linguistic text parsing. Also supports R, Python, and Scala
code/libraries via Spark.

MODEL MANAGEMENT
Built-in management with condition-based alert generation.
CAPABILITIES

Exports predictive models in C++ (text analytics cannot be exported); integrates with data sources
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
and operational systems via standard interfaces such as JDBC and ODBC. PolyAnalyst includes REST
CAPABILITIES
APIS for data scoring; Megaputer recommends customers perform scoring in PolyAnalyst itself.

Tasks such as publishing a model and text analytics jobs can be instantiated via a scheduler and
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
automated by means of scripts.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Managed cloud and on premises.

PolyAnalyst can be either licensed or leased as a standalone, server- or cluster-based application. Data
LICENSING analysis and result-reporting engines are provided under separate licenses. Custom domain-specific
analytical solutions can be licensed as a service or along with the underlying analytical platform.

47
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft believes that data, analytics, and AI can
accelerate digital transformation for every organization
and help to drive action. The company also believes
that intelligent solutions enable differentiation. Its
Cortana Intelligence Suite commercializes Microsoft’s
IP in big data and machine learning and includes
information management, machine learning and
analytics as well as advanced analytics services and
pre-built solution templates. The suite consists of
thirteen different products which are all part of Azure
data services, packaged together to help organizations
build and deploy predictive applications and solutions.
These can be purchased as one line item or services can
be bought separately.
Information management products in the suite include
Azure Data Factory to help build pipelines and collect
data. Azure Data Catalog is used to manage data sources
and Event Hubs provides a staging area to deal with data
streams. Microsoft Machine Learning Studio provides
automation and ease-of-use features (e.g., wizards,
drag-and-drop capabilities) for building, training,
scoring, testing, and comparing models. Models can
be operationalized as Web services and consumed by
applications and services.
Cortana Intelligence Suite is completely cloud-based.
Like most cloud offerings, its pricing is based on
compute and storage. Microsoft also offers on-premises
machine learning through SQL Server.

After years of building data science IP, Microsoft is commercializing its

knowledge and experience in Cortana to address big data, advanced analytics,
UPSHOT
and AI. A welcome addition to the market, the suite targets data scientists and
business analysts looking to build out intelligent applications and solutions.

48 
Product Name Version Description

Microsoft Cortana Intel- Microsoft suite of services for machine learning and AI.
ligence Suite

DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Visual, self-service facilities for data connectivity, cleansing, enriching, blending, and transformation
via Azure Data Factory.
30 connectors including Azure Data Services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, Salesforce, and other
third-party cloud services; SAP BW and SAP HANA; commercial and open source RDBMS platforms,
NoSQL, Hadoop, OData-compliant data feeds, and file systems. Azure Data Factory can connect to
other Azure data sources, including Azure Data Lake Store, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Azure
DocumentDB, as well as Azure Stream.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Four supervised ML algorithms: classification, clustering, anomaly detection, and regression. Also
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED supports ML techniques in open source libraries such as R and Python.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Built-in management and monitoring; can visualize and compare models and lineage information
CAPABILITIES (e.g., authors, contributors, changes, etc.).

Models can be operationalized as Azure Web services and consumed by other Azure services, custom-
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
built cloud and on-premises applications, other cloud services. Models exploit in-database scoring
CAPABILITIES
with supported Azure services.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES N/A

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Cloud only.

LICENSING Can be licensed as a single line item or à la carte.

49
www.opentext.com
OpenText provides predictive analytics through its Big
Data Analytics product, which is offered through its
OpenText Analytics Suite. The suite consists of three
products: iHub, Big Data Analytics, and InfoFusion.
Big Data Analytics, where the predictive analytics
capabilities reside, is geared to business users. It is a
columnar-based software that provides a visual drag-
and-drop interface for knowledge workers to explore big
data and perform predictive analytics using pre-defined
algorithms against billions of rows of data. Big Data
Analytics is tightly integrated with iHub, which helps
organizations prepare data and cleanse it for analysis as
well as share the results in dashboards or reports. iHub
also provides APIs to enable analytics to be embedded in
any mobile or Web application.
OpenText also provides connections to unstructured
data for use in predictive analysis through its InfoFusion
product. InfoFusion enables text mining of content data
to extract entities and sentiment. That data can then be
utilized as part of Big Data Analytics. Tight integration
of Big Data Analytics and iHub with InfoFusion is
planned for 2017.

OpenText is targeted at business analysts who want an easy-to-use, drag-and-

drop interface to build predictive models. The company is leveraging its heritage
as an EIM vendor to provide text analytics capabilities for using unstructured
UPSHOT data to make predictions, as well as black-box predictive analytics for business
users and analysts. OpenText is well-suited to IT departments that provide
predictive analytics to nontechnical users who want to analyze their data and
then share their insights.

50 
Product Name Version Description

OpenText Analytics Suite 16 Consists of three products: iHub, Big Data Analytics, and Infofusion. iHub and Big Data
Analytics share a single login.

Big Data Analytics allows users to integrate data from different sources via a drag-and-drop interface.
DATA PREPARATION
It also provides data preparation features including cleansing, enrichment, and creating fields that
CAPABILITIES
aggregate, rename, or calculate expressions.
Native connectors for popular SQL databases, an ODBC driver, and a remote data provider option for
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
loading data from a Web address. Native Spark and Hadoop support should be available in mid-2017.

Anomaly detection, association rules, clustering, profiling, segmentation, decision trees, Naive Bayes
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
classification, correlation, linear and logistic regression, summarization, and pattern mining. Support
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
for R and Python is expected in mid-2017.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Big Data Analytics provides an administrative environment for users to save models via a folder-based
CAPABILITIES interface.

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
iHub provides APIs for embedding analytics into applications including REST V2 via BDA.
CAPABILITIES

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Workflows can be saved and then scheduled.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Both options are available.

LICENSING Licensing for Big Data Analytics is based on rows of data.

51
www.oracle.com
Oracle’s predictive and advanced analytics philosophy proprietary machine learning algorithms and integration
is to move the algorithms to the data management with open source MLlib and R as part of Oracle R
platform—specifically its database and big data Advanced Analytics for Hadoop (ORAAH).
platforms—rather than exporting data to specialized
Oracle also offers Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC). OAC
analytical servers. Oracle’s Database Cloud Service
is designed to help business users tell their stories. It
includes Oracle Advanced Analytics (OAA), more than
provides a suite of tools that enable business analysts
30 in-database implementations of machine learning
to connect to data, prepare it, and analyze it in what
algorithms that are optimized to run as SQL functions
Oracle calls a “smart data discovery” environment. OAC
to leverage the Oracle database. OAA also provides
integrates with OAA through the common database
tight integration with R so users can “push down” R
access to provide visual model output from OAA and
scripts to equivalent in-database SQL functions. On
ORAAH that is more visually appropriate for business
Exadata Engineered Systems, “smart scan” technology
analysts such as coded probability bands.
enables the “scoring” of machine learning models on the
Exadata storage tier. Similarly, Oracle’s Big Data Cloud
Service and Big Data Appliance provide a number of

Geared towards data scientists, “citizen data scientists,” and application

developers, Oracle Advanced Analytics supports in-database predictive analytics
and machine learning deployments for enterprises. ORAAH provides similar
machine learning functionality for big data. For those utilizing Oracle Databases
UPSHOT
or Oracle Big Data platforms (cloud, on premises, or hybrid) who wish to leverage
their investment and eliminate data movement in order to perform and deploy
predictive analytics, Oracle Advanced Analytics and ORAAH are well worth
looking into.

52 
Product Name Version Description

Oracle Database High and 12.2 Provides in-database, parallelized implementations of 30+ machine learning algorithms,
Extreme Editions (includes integration with open source R, and the optional SQL Developer/Oracle Data Miner
OAA) workflow UI.
Oracle Advanced Analytics 12.2 Provides in-database, parallelized implementations of 30+ machine learning algorithms,
Database Option integration with open source R and the optional SQL Developer/Oracle Data Miner
(on-premises) workflow UI.
Oracle Big Data Cloud Service 12.2 Machine learning algorithms running in Hadoop and Spark.
(includes ORAAH)
Oracle Analytics Cloud 12.2 Includes a suite of tools for data prep, visualization, discovery, collaboration, packaged KPIs.

Oracle provides data management and ETL support (SQL, GoldenGate, Oracle Data Preparation Cloud
Services, etc.) for ingestion, profiling, and cleansing; transformation; and calculation, including
DATA PREPARATION features. Additionally, OAA adds support for auto binning, handling of missing values, aggregation,
CAPABILITIES geospatial data, text tokenization, and thesaurus while leveraging Oracle Database’s other data
management and processing features. On Hadoop and Big Data Cloud Services, Oracle provides
support for Hive, Spark, and Big Data SQL.

OAA runs in the Oracle database and ORAAH runs on Hadoop. Supports all data types supported by
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Oracle including transactional, geospatial, graph, and support for text data and text mining inside
the database using Oracle Text.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
OAA supports multiple machine learning algorithms in each category for classification, clustering,
anomaly detection, regression, attribute importance, feature creation, explicit semantic analysis,
association rules, basic statistical functions, time series, and CRAN R packages and Spark MLlib. All
OAA algorithms additionally leverage other database features to support unstructured data. ORAAH
supports regression, classification, clustering, feature creation, and R transparency to Hive. Oracle
Cloud Analytics supports regression and clustering, and user’s custom R scripts.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Incorporates the features of a database including versioning and audit tracking. Provides the Oracle
CAPABILITIES Data Miner GUI and PL/SQL scripts to schedule and run models.

Models are built and run natively in the Oracle database or in Hadoop. Includes SQL Developer exten-
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
sion (Oracle Data Miner) for model building, evaluation, and application development and in the near
CAPABILITIES
future, the Oracle Machine Learning Zeppelin notebook.

Supports automated scheduling of predictive models. No explicit support for automated model
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
monitoring but this can be achieved through PL/SQL scripts.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Cloud, on premises, or hybrid.

LICENSING Cloud and on-premises pricing.

53
www.pentaho.com
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group Company, provides a data multiple paths for building models via R, Python,
integration and analytics platform based on open source MLlib, Scala, and Weka.
that combines data access, integration, and analytics.
Machine learning scripts can be embedded directly in
With the recent addition of its machine learning orches-
a data workflow to enable Pentaho users to leverage
tration capability, the platform now supports data and
existing data preparation and feature engineering efforts
feature engineering, model building, model deployment,
in a production environment. Pentaho also provides
and model updating for the data science process. Geared
APIs for embedding visualizations containing models
towards data scientists, data engineers, and analysts who
into existing applications.
want to build and deploy models with complex data
using open source technologies, the platform provides

One of the first commercial open source analytics vendors, Pentaho is targeted
to data scientists who want to use complex, diverse data for predictive analytics
UPSHOT at scale, and supports structured and unstructured data. Well-known for its
capabilities in data integration and embedding analytics, the platform is also
worth considering for embedding predictive analytics into applications.

54 
Product Name Version Description

Pentaho Machine Learning 7.0 Orchestration software that streamlines the machine learning workflow and helps data
Orchestration (Capability Set scientists, engineers and analysts collaboratively build and deploy predictive models on
within Pentaho ) big data. Supported machine learning languages and libraries include R, Python, Weka,
Scala, and Java.

DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Includes automated data onboarding, cleansing, and validation in a drag-and-drop environment; also
includes data standardization and validation.
Supports a range of data sources including relational databases, analytic databases, NoSQL databases,
Hadoop and other files, business applications, and more.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS Supports R, Python, and Scala, and includes open source Weka as part of its platform. Weka contains
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, and clustering.

The data scientist can see the model and scripts from within the data integration view, and can modify
MODEL MANAGEMENT
them in their tool of choice (e.g., R Studio or Jupyter) before re-importing them into Pentaho for
CAPABILITIES
incorporation into an updated analytic data delivery process.
Pentaho allows data engineers to execute data scientists’ scripts in R, Python, MLlib, Scala, or Weka
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT by embedding them directly in a data workflow, allowing them to take advantage of existing data and
CAPABILITIES feature engineering efforts. Using APIs for integrating BI and visualizations, organizations can also
embed models in Pentaho within their existing applications.

Pentaho data integration (PDI) includes version control and tracking to instantiate a new version or
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
rollback to a previous version of a model; also includes scheduling capabilities.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Supports both.

Based on the number of server cores and (if big data) Hadoop nodes; the Data Science Pack comes with
LICENSING
an enterprise license.

55
www.salesforce.com
Salesforce Einstein provides pre-packaged predic-
tive applications that can be part of any Salesforce
application, such as including analytics, sales, service,
marketing, community, apps, commerce, or IoT. Ein-
stein learns and makes predictions on data in Salesforce
and can provide each customer with unique models
built from their data. These insights and predictions are
served up as part of Salesforce applications. Salesforce
also offers Einstein Data Discovery for more technical
users to explore data and build predictive models using
automated model building.
Salesforce Einstein is a layer of abstraction on top of
the Salesforce data science platform used to develop
applications for business users. That data science
platform consists of four layers including a multitenant
infrastructure, data services, AI platform services, and
a development platform. Much of the analytics intel-
lectual property for the core of Einstein Analytics was
developed in-house. Salesforce also offers BeyondCore,
which provides automated predictive model building for
nonstatisticians and data scientists.

Einstein is a good example of how predictive analytics can be delivered in a

powerful intelligent platform to nontechnical users. It is worth considering if
UPSHOT
your organization is looking for prepackaged applications for CRM targeted to
business users, or machine learning APIs for business analysts.

56 
Product Name Version Description

Salesforce Einstein AI built into the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce Einstein automatically prepares the data to make it ready for machine learning. Beyond its
DATA PREPARATION
native integration with Salesforce data, it reads the metadata, enriches the dataset with unique Auto-
CAPABILITIES
Feature Engineering capabilities, and splits the data into training and validation sets.

DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED Uses all Salesforce data as well as other data found in the Salesforce cloud.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Statistical algorithms, machine learning, deep learning.
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED

MODEL MANAGEMENT Einstein’s native model management capabilities include model scheduling, model execution, model
CAPABILITIES monitoring, log analysis, and model versioning.

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT The predictions and insights made by Einstein are written back to the Salesforce platform, which
CAPABILITIES enables them to be operationalized (e.g., included in a workflow), extended, or customized.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Models are served in an automated way.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Cloud only.

LICENSING Add-on to Salesforce cloud, $50/month per user.

57
www.sap.com
The goal of the SAP Predictive Analytics Suite is to
provide a collaborative platform to create, deploy, and
maintain predictive models. Geared to data scientists,
business analysts, and business users, the company is
using a three-pronged approach to deliver on its vision.
First, it provides tools to help accelerate the model-
building process. It offers two approaches to model
building. One is Automated Modeler, which provides a
wizard-driven approach for use by business analysts to
build models. SAP also offers Expert Analytics as part of
the suite, which provides data scientists access to predic-
tive algorithms and tooling. Data scientists can use
Expert Analytics to build custom pipelines that exploit
HANA’s in-database Automated Predictive Libraries
(APL) and Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) along with
R (Python is not yet supported).
Second, SAP is automating the model-building process
with Predictive Factory to put machine learning and
predictive models into production at scale (i.e., building
and managing thousands of models).
Third, its strategy is to enable predictive models to be
embedded into applications and systems. It is currently
embedding predictive capabilities into its own SAP
products. It is also pushing machine learning into
its Cloud BI product in a guided discovery model to
automatically find insights in data.
SAP Predictive Analytics Suite integrates with both SAP
HANA and with open source Hadoop. Users can access
data in HANA or in Hadoop as well as schedule analyti-
cal processing in either environment.

SAP has come a long way over the past few years with its predictive analytics
offerings to provide a complete life cycle approach. It also provides predictive
UPSHOT analytics production at scale via its Predictive Factory. Geared towards business
analysts and data scientists in midsize to large companies (especially those that
already have SAP installed), it also provides some support for business users.

58 
Product Name Version Description

SAP Predictive Analytics Suite 3.2 Consists of three components: SAP Predictive Analytics (comprised of SAP Automated
Analytics, SAP Expert Analytics, and SAP Predictive Factory), SAP Predictive Services, and
SAP Predictive Analytics Integrator.

Provided in Data Manager as part of SAP Automated Analytics. This includes data integration as well
as data preparation for predictive modeling, including auto-generating attributes such as sums, dif-
DATA PREPARATION ferences, and ratios. The suite also lets users calculate new variables. Data Manager creates analytical
CAPABILITIES data sets based on time-stamped populations that can be automatically prepared and consumed by
modeling and operationalization workflows and which enable users to identify what happened to an
entity leading up to an event. Supports access to common RDBMSs.
SAP Hana, SAP Hana Vora, Oracle, Teradata, SQL server, Hadoop (Hive, Spark), Generic JDBC (Expert
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Analytics), IBM DB2, IBM PureData System for Analytics, PostgreSQL, Sybase, and Vertica.
Classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and time series. PAL contains many algo-
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
rithms. Also includes R in Expert Analytics; users can integrate their own algorithms via nodes. No
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
support yet for Python.
Predictive Factory allows users to schedule the automated application of predictive models on data
MODEL MANAGEMENT sets that can then be consumed by business applications and BI systems. Testing of data and perfor-
CAPABILITIES mance deviation can also be scheduled and the models automatically retrained. It also automatically
monitors model performance using a set of KPIs.
Models can be exported to SQL, Java, JavaScript, SAS, C, or C++ code, PMML, and several other lan-
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT
guages for use in custom-developed processes or applications. Models can be applied without export
CAPABILITIES
using direct in-database application or by embedding models in SAP business applications.
Includes automated model building and model application, and automatic retraining, scoring, and
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES applying models to new data when models get stale. Furthermore, it enables the automatic creation of
analytical data sets based on a population snapshot that is automatically refreshed.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Available in both the cloud and on premises.

Predictive Analytics Suite is the building block for all on-premises implementations. It’s priced by
the size of the database to be analyzed or scored, whichever is larger (in units of 64GB). Predictive
LICENSING Analytics Suite includes one license of Predictive Analytics Modeler. Additional Named User licenses
of Predictive Analytics Modeler can be added. Predictive Analytics Suite includes: Data Manager,
In-Database Scoring, Predictive Factory, Social Link Analysis, and Recommendation.

59
www.sas.com
SAS offers software for the complete predictive opening up its platform with open APIs for SAS, Java,
analytics life cycle, from data access and preparation to Python, and R.
production and management, within one application.
SAS has a multiprong vision for the future of predictive
Through its SAS Analytics Suite, the company’s goal
analytics. It supports the automation of model building
is to provide customers with a simple, powerful, and
through easy-to-use interfaces as well as in a factory
automated platform to help solve any business problem.
model that supports building thousands of models at
SAS, known for its comprehensive analytics capabilities,
scale. The software enables users to embed analytics, as
is continuing to develop more methods for machine
well—in memory, on Hadoop, in streams, in devices,
learning, NLP, and edge computing in order to help
and in databases. SAS is also bringing analytics to audio
organizations analyze multiple data structures. It also
and video, as well as utilizing AI to enable human-
enables customers to use multiple methods together. The
machine interaction in its products.
company is moving its products to one unified interface
to support collaboration across multiple personas (data
analyst, data scientist, and so on). The company is also

Well-known as a leader in complex analytics, SAS offers comprehensive support

for the complete analytics life cycle geared to multiple personas. SAS also
continues to innovate with new methods, features such as hyperparameter
UPSHOT
optimization, automation through rapid predictive modeling and factory
miner, third-generation in-memory analytic servers, and solutions for fraud,
cybersecurity, and IoT.

60 
Product Name Version Description

SAS Analytics Suite 14.2 Analytics suite with leading-edge algorithms to solve even the most complex problems.

SAS provides data preparation, data integration and data quality capabilities that support ETL, ELT,
profiling, data governance, master data management, data federation, lineage, business rules, and
DATA PREPARATION
real-time or batch data quality. SAS can password-encrypt files and restrict access to both transfer and
CAPABILITIES
storage; also provides the ability to de-identify information and provides row/column security and
data masking.
Supports native data sources such as Hadoop (including Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, BigInsights,
and Pivotal), Impala, Hive, Hive Server2, HAWQ, Redshift, PostgreSQL, SAP R/3, SAP BW, PI System,
DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata, Informix, SQL Server, Netezza, Aster, Greenplum, HPE Vertica, ParAccel,
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
Firebird, flat files, SAP HANA, message queues, streaming, unstructured (such as PDF and DOC), and
social media. SAS also provides access to more than 32 data sources via ODBC, OLE DB and PC Files
engines (which includes Excel, Paradox, CSV, TXT, and more). Also supports streams.

SAS provides a range of multidisciplinary analytics including descriptive statistics, forecasting,

machine learning, text mining, and operations research. Examples include regression, LARS/LASO/
elastic networks, ensemble, two-stage, PCA, robust spatial, GLM, graph networks, weighted linear
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
assignment, minimum spanning tree, state space, variable clustering, deep neural, SVM, factorization
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
machines (including tensorfactorization), decision tree, gradient boosting, extreme gradient boosting,
forest, Bayesian, net-lift, hierarchical clustering, SOM (batch and Nadaraya-Watson), k-means cluster-
ing, fuzzy clustering; includes open APIs for Java, Python, and R.

Includes validation of both SAS and open models before they go into production. Offers Model
MODEL MANAGEMENT Monitoring Reports that evaluate predicted and actual target values; reports also include Lift, Gini
CAPABILITIES ROC, Gini Trend, K-S, and Mean Squared Error for prediction models. Users set performance thresholds
which trigger notifications for models that may require retraining.

MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT Supports in-database scoring and in-stream scoring; also supports model export via PMML, C++, and
CAPABILITIES Java.

SAS automates the entire analytics life cycle including automated, standardized, and repeatable
data prep processes. For model development, SAS automates code creation through Code Tasks and
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Snippets. SAS also automates the creation of thousands of segmented models and will pick the best-
performing model for each segment. For data scientists, SAS can optimize hyperparameters to help
them save time and reduce error.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Both are supported.

For on-premises deployments, SAS offers named user, desktop/server-based, and processor-based
LICENSING subscription licensing options.For SaaS/Cloud deployments, SAS offers named user, server-based, and
concurrent user licensing options.

61
www.teradata.com
One of the Teradata’s guiding principles is that it is not
simply a provider of pure technology. Its primary focus
is building solutions that are technology enabled. This
includes patented solutions from its big data consulting
arm, Think Big. Additionally, the company will work
with best-of-breed and open source solutions as part of
its strategy to solve business problems. Its own solutions
include Teradata Aster Analytics, Teradata in-database
analytics, and Think Big Data Science Lab 3.0.
The Teradata Aster Analytics software leverages mas-
sively parallel processing (MPP) platforms to provide a
scalable prebuilt analytics library of functions for data
preparation, predictive modeling, machine learning, and
the operationalization of insights. In addition to these
functions, which can be executed through SQL, Aster
Analytics can also run R code and libraries natively in its
MPP architecture. Teradata also offers an extension for
the open source KNIME data mining workbench. This
allows data scientists to access Aster Analytics functions
via KNIME to explore and prepare data sets, build
models, visualize results and package them as workflows.
The Aster Analytics extension for KNIME can run
the individual functions or complete Aster Analytics
workflows.
The company offers over 1,000 data exploration, data
preparation, and analytics functions that run directly
in the Teradata database. Teradata has also developed
Think Big Data Science Lab 3.0, an open source offering
that supports data science notebooks such as Jupyter.
Think Big Data Science Lab is free software, available
via Github. It includes prebuilt packages for R, Tensor-
Flow, Spark, and other open source technologies.

Teradata is moving past it roots as a big data management/data warehouse

company to help its customers build the next generation of advanced analytics
solutions—solutions that require algorithms at scale. With more than 50% of
UPSHOT its staff available as consultants, Teradata will work with data scientists and
business users to create and deploy these solutions. On the software side,
Teradata continues to support solutions that are targeted towards business
analysts with SQL or R programming skills.

62 
Product Name/Version Version Description

Teradata Aster Analytics 7 Multigenre advanced analytics at scale to help business users uncover and operationalize
nonintuitive insights.

DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
Aster Analytics provides a variety of data exploration and preparation functions including statistics,
descriptive analytics, IoT transformation, and parsers for unstructured and multistructured data.
Teradata Warehouse Miner provides a visual interface for data preparation and exploration functions
that runs on data directly in Teradata.
Teradata offers a data and query federation fabric that facilitates data access across distributed and
heterogeneous sources via QueryGrid. Supports third-party RDBMSs such as Oracle; any database can
be supported by creating a connector via APIs. QueryGrid also supports Oracle with an SDK for other
databases, NoSQL platforms, cloud apps, and cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3.
More than 10 supervised learning techniques, including: classification, clustering, pattern matching,
path analysis, decision trees, distribution matching, naïve Bayes classification, graph analysis, neural
networks, and text and sentiment analysis. Aster Analytics also supports open source libraries such as
R and Python.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Teradata Warehouse Miner provides some model management capabilities for analytic data manage-
CAPABILITIES ment and model version control.

Models can be operationalized and packaged for business users via Aster AppCenter, or, if applicable,
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT instantiated as stored procedures in the Teradata Database. Models exploit in-database scoring, along
CAPABILITIES with Aster Analytics’ MPP processing. Aster Analytics models can be exported as a PMML-like model
that can be scored on any Java-supported platform using the Aster Scoring API.
Aster Analytics is also embedded within Teradata solutions. For example, Customer Interaction
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
Manager leverages Aster’s pathing functions within their interface built for marketers.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES On premises and in the cloud on Teradata IntelliCloud, AWS, and Azure.

License models differ based on the deployment platform. For cloud deployments, subscription
LICENSING licenses are available on an hourly, monthly, or annual basis. For Hadoop, term licenses per core are
offered. For appliance deployments, perpetual and term licenses are available.

63
www.tibco.com
The goal of the TIBCO’s Insight Platform suite is to
enable users to explore data faster and take action sooner.
To that end, it supports an insight-to-action paradigm
that builds on its expertise in visualization, analytics,
and data interconnection. Spotfire also integrates with
TIBCO StreamBase, a platform for streaming ingest
and analysis to help put models into production.
Spotfire caters to three distinct classes of user:
nontechnical business users; analysts, engineers, and
scientists; and data scientists. It supports descriptive
stats, similarity, clustering (including K-means), regres-
sion, correlations, fitting, and forecasting, among other
types of analysis. In addition, Spotfire offers what
TIBCO calls “contextual” calculations—prebuilt tools
or workflows users can launch just by clicking on them.
Supported contextual calculations include clustering
and classification. Users can save models and scripts as
data functions in the Spotfire Library, a central, shared
repository accessible to desktop and Web clients that
is used to store Spotfire analyses, data files, custom
data functions, information links, shared connections,
and data visualization color schemes. Users can export
R models to run natively in StreamBase, as well as
TIBCO’s other streaming analytics products.

Best known for its visual capabilities in Spotfire, TIBCO offers a number of other
products to help with the predictive analytics life cycle. The recent purchase of
UPSHOT
Statistica will blend TIBCO’s integration and visualization capabilities with the
strength of Statistica’s analytics platform.

64 
Product Name
TIBCO Spotfire Analyst
TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for
R (TERR)
TIBCO StreamBase
DATA PREPARATION
CAPABILITIES
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
MODEL MANAGEMENT
CAPABILITIES
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT Spotfire users can export R models to run natively in TIBCO’s streaming analytics products, including
CAPABILITIES StreamBase. Spotfire also supports export to PMML via the R PMML package.
AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES
CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES
LICENSING
Version Description
7.9 Secure, governed, enterprise analytics platform with built-in data wrangling that delivers
recommendation-driven, visual, geo, predictive and streaming analytics.
4.3 A parallel compute engine for executing R, Python, and other code. TERR incorporates IP
from TIBCO’s S-PLUS, an implementation of S, a statistical programming language.
10 Streaming data analytics platform.
Visual interface for data connectivity, cleansing, enriching, blending, and transformation.
The platform supports connectivity to more than 20 data sources, including all major RDBMS plat-
forms, big data platforms, and cloud services. A bundled data federation layer permits federated
access to any JDBC-compliant source. Supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and big data platforms such
as Hadoop, Spark, MongoDB, and Cassandra.
More than five techniques including: descriptive stats, similarity, clustering (including K-means),
regression, correlations, fitting, and forecasting. Supports additional techniques via open source
projects (R, KNIME, and Python, H20,ai), as well as proprietary models and libraries (S-PLUS, MatLab,
SAS).
Models and other statistical/analytical scripts are stored as data functions in the Spotfire Library,
permitting reuse in multiple applications.
Automation via TIBCO Spotfire Automation Services, sold separately from Spotfire. Spotfire Automa-
tion Services includes Job Builder, a visual tool that bundles a set of predefined tasks for creating jobs,
along with an API. Job Builder is accessible via Spotfire Analyst. Jobs can be scheduled to execute on
demand, periodically, or according to other criteria.
On premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments. Spotfire is also available via the AWS marketplace.
Licensing is via an annual subscription.
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www.statistica.io
TIBCO Statistica is focused on providing deep
functionality for the analytics life cycle in a practical,
easy-to-use and cost-effective platform. Geared towards
both business analysts and data scientists, Statistica
provides an updated visual drag-and-drop UI for
business analysts as well as a workbench environment.
The company is now opening up its platform to open
source tools including R, Python, and Scala.
Statistica is also embedding its algorithms in big data
platforms such as Hadoop and even in sensors and
IoT gateways. Its goal is to bring the analytics to the
data. To this end, Statistica recently released Statistica
Edge, which allows organizations to deploy data prep
and analytics workflows to sensors, smart devices,
and equipment. Users can also invest in the Statistica
Enterprise bundle, which offers rules-based decision
support to front line staff and support for embedding
algorithms both in big data platforms and in traditional
databases.

While the company has gone through some organizational changes since it
was owned by Dell, it still maintains its focus on providing an extremely solid
platform for business analysts and data scientists. The TIBCO Statistica platform
UPSHOT
will be a good addition to the TIBCO Spotfire platform where it will complement
TIBCO’s visual analytics and connectivity strengths with its own strength in the
predictive analytics life cycle.

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Product Name/Version Version Description

TIBCO Statistica 13.2 An integrated analytics platform that provides support for the analytics life cycle.

Provides options for merging, aggregating, stacking and unstacking, transformations and smoothing,
cleaning/recoding/imputing missing data, identifying duplicate records, and finding and recoding
DATA PREPARATION
outliers. Numerous specialized ETL functions are available to align customer records from different
CAPABILITIES
sources, to align time-stamped or batch data recorded at different time intervals, to aggregate diverse
data sources, etc.

Statistica can directly access data from all standard relational database formats, as well as specialized
DATA SOURCES SUPPORTED
databases (e.g., the OSI PI database for process data); text, Excel, SAS, SPSS, and Hadoop.

Supports association, classification, decision trees, neural networks, regression, optimization,

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
simulation, and others. Also supports R and Python. Integration to app marketplaces such as Apertiva
TECHNIQUES SUPPORTED
and Algorithmia. Integrates to Azure MachineML, H20.ai.

MODEL MANAGEMENT Provides a model repository for versioning and tracking changes; can monitor models via a monitoring
CAPABILITIES and alerting server.

PMML, Java, C#, SQL, and SAS, where data and analysis configurations (and others such as models,
MODEL PRODUCTION/EXPORT rules, etc.) are abstracted as separate version-controlled objects. Can also deploy a workflow and
CAPABILITIES make it available as a web service. Can port to visualization tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and Spotfire.
Supports in-database analytics.

AUTOMATION CAPABILITIES Users can create workflows called recipes, which can be reused.

CLOUD VERSUS ON PREMISES Primarily on premises (the business analyst UI will be browser-based on the cloud in fall).

LICENSING N/A

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 TDWI Analyst Viewpoint
As a special TDWI Navigator Report feature, the
Analyst Viewpoint takes a deeper look at the following
sponsoring organizations to lay out in greater detail the
key differentiators and some of the pros and cons of
their offerings.

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 TDWI Analyst Viewpoint

www.sas.com
SAS has long been a market leader for complex and advanced AUTOMATION. SAS solutions are strong on the automation
analytics, which includes predictive analytics. Founded over front. Although some vendors automate a workflow or
forty years ago, the company has continued to maintain a provide automated model building, SAS does more across the
solid customer base, a strong road map, and year-over-year analytics life cycle. Very important, SAS provides automated
revenue growth. model monitoring by selecting and alerting the enterprise
when a model is degrading. SAS also provides automated
The predictive market is a dynamic one, however, and SAS
champion/challenger capabilities. Model alerts can be
realizes this. On the one hand, there are commercial products
generated at any frequency and can be emailed automatically
(of which SAS is one) that address the full analytics life cycle.
to those who need to know. As more companies move to
On the other hand, open source has gained a lot of traction
actually deploy predictive models rather than simply build
in analytics—especially for machine learning and building
them, these kinds of capabilities will be critical.
analytics apps. A new generation of data scientists, who can
code and enjoy it, are helping to build this momentum. HISTORY OF INNOVATION. SAS invests heavily in R&D—
nearly twice the percent of annual revenue that many other
Given this, SAS is making its platform more open. In fact,
technology companies do. It is building new techniques for
SAS Viya now includes integration with R and Python, and
neural networks and deep learning. It can perform advanced
SAS has projects such as SASPy which enables SAS to be
analytics in event streams. It is infusing advanced analytics
embedded in Python. Opening the platform is an important
into its key areas of growth and investment including risk
move for SAS.
management, visualization, customer intelligence, data
TDWI believes some key differentiators for SAS include: management, fraud, and security. SAS is even embedding
natural language processing and deep learning inside of its
BREADTH AND DEPTH OF FUNCTIONALITY. Although some
applications to provide more human-like interactions.
complain about the price of SAS products, you get what
you pay for. In this case, it is hard to beat the breadth and Overall, SAS should be on the short-list for those
depth of the SAS offering. The company provides many organizations with complex analytics problems, that need
algorithms for analytics, refactored to support big data. It a complete solution, and prefer a graphical interface. SAS’s
can even support analytics in streams. SAS addresses the move to include open source algorithms in its platform
complete analytics life cycle, from data management through should also be good news to those who prefer them for model
preparation to model building and deployment. Text mining development but need a complete solution.
is part of the platform to deal with unstructured text data.
It also addresses governance through its model management
capabilities, and it provides a platform for decision
management. In fact, SAS is often ahead of other vendors
in thinking through the practicalities of what is involved in
advanced analytics.

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TDWI Analyst Viewpoint
www.alteryx.com
Alteryx, founded in 2010, was originally focused on
helping line-of-business users access and blend disparate
data sources and perform spatial analysis. In 2012 it added
predictive analytics capabilities to deliver a complete
self-service platform that allows users to access, blend,
prepare, and analyze data via a visual interface. With its
recent acquisition of Yhat, Alteryx will also provide tools
to manage and deploy machine learning and predictive
models for data scientists. Yhat tools enable data scientists
to embed predictive models in any application capable of
making REST API requests. Other Yhat tools provide
model automation and tracking over time. These tools are
being integrated into the Alteryx platform to provide a
unified solution for line-of-business users and data scientists.
The market likes Alteryx. Its stock price has continued
to rise since its IPO in March 2017. The company does a
good job growing its customer base as well as collaborating
with partners. TDWI has identified these additional
differentiators:
• DEALING WITH DISPARATE DATA. Aside from connecting
to many data sources (including spreadsheets, social
media, cloud applications, and data warehouses such
as Oracle, Teradata, Hadoop, and Cloudera), Alteryx
allows users to enrich data for analysis through third-
party packaged data from Experian, D&B, and
TomTom as well as census data from both the U.S. and
Canada. Alteryx also provides parsing tools for text
data and tools to work with geospatial data. TDWI
research indicates that organizations that use disparate
data in their analytics are more likely to measure a
top- or bottom-line impact; Alteryx is ahead of many
vendors in this space.
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• REALIZING THERE IS MORE TO SELF-SERVICE THAN THE TOOL
ITSELF. Alteryx is geared primarily towards the business
analyst. With self-service making analytics and even
predictive analytics easier to use, many organizations
are jumping on board. Alteryx supports R and is
adding Python as nodes in its GUI. They also have a
partnership with Data Robot. However, TDWI often
finds that although many organizations use self-service
tools, they are not necessarily widely penetrated in an
organization. Part of the problem is skills development.
To overcome this challenge, Alteryx has partnered with
Udacity to provide a 12-week nano-degree in predictive
analytics.
• BUILDING OFF ITS BASE. Alteryx says it focuses on what
it does best, which is leading customers through
an analytics journey that starts with data discovery
and preparation, and then help them move up the
analytics maturity curve with geospatial, predictive,
and prescriptive analytics, ultimately leading to model
deployment. In this way, Alteryx can impact business
processes, improve decisions, and grow its base of users.
Alteryx is riding the self-service wave through data
preparation and into building and deploying predictive
analytics. With its move to operationalize analytics with
Alteryx Server and its Yhat acquisition, it should continue
to provide value to its customers.

www.cloudera.com
Cloudera was founded in 2008 to develop the first
enterprise-class implementation of Apache Hadoop. The
company provides a family of products and services to
support the open source big data ecosystem. With a
heavy investment by Intel, the company had built a solid
foundation to become the premier Hadoop distribution
provider. Cloudera has contributed to an ecosystem around
Hadoop, which is important as Hadoop is moving into
mainstream adoption in production environments. Now, as
Hadoop hype has cooled down, Cloudera is emphasizing its
role as an enterprise data platform.
Of course, analytics is a key driver for big data, and Cloudera
realized early on that it wasn’t enough to simply provide
a commercial distribution for Hadoop. The company
understood that analytics (and more specifically, advanced
analytics) is a key driver for big data. Cloudera partners with
analytics providers such as SAS and Tableau, but is taking
analytics further. Recently, the company expanded its
message to include customer insights that rely on analytics
as well as IoT and cybersecurity. Taking advantage of a new
generation of data scientists who are interested in open source
analytics tools, Cloudera has introduced its own Cloudera
Data Science Workbench to provide a “great data science
experience” in the Hadoop ecosystem.
TDWI had identified several key differentiators for Cloudera,
including:
71
TDWI Analyst Viewpoint
• STRENGTH IN BIG DATA. In many ways, data science is an
outgrowth of the need to analyze big data, which comes
with its own set of preparation and processing issues.
Cloudera understands big data, processing it in-memory
and in-parallel. The company is also bringing other
aspects of the analytics life cycle to enterprise big data,
such as data wrangling and model testing.
• STRENGTH IN OPEN SOURCE. Cloudera was founded on open
source technology. It is leveraging its strength in open
source to support data scientists, many of whom are
going to use open source analytics tools for data analysis
and application building. Although the user interface is
specific to Cloudera, users can use multiple open source
technologies in the workbench. A key concept in the
workbench is context. Each team will want their own
area for various kinds of projects—whether that be R,
Python, or Scala. The company also works with dozens
of other partners.
• THINKING THROUGH THE ISSUES. Cloudera has a history
of thinking through how to make open source suitable
for the enterprise. For example, the company has
added tools and functionality to support solid metadata
management and security in Hadoop, addressing
enterprise concerns. Likewise, it is being thoughtful
about how to help organizations test and deploy models
into production in a distributed ecosystem.
TDWI research indicates that open source tools for advanced
analytics, such as predictive analytics and machine learning,
are rapidly gaining steam, especially among those who like to
code. Cloudera is in a good position to leverage its strengths
in open source and big data to provide a valuable platform for
data scientists.
TDWI NAVIGATOR PLATINUM SPONSORS

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics,

business intelligence and data management software and
services, SAS helps customers at more than 83,000 sites
make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving
customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW.

Alteryx, Inc. is a leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx

provides analysts with the ability to easily discover, prep,
blend, and analyze all data using a repeatable workflow,
then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights
in hours, not weeks. Thousands of companies worldwide rely
on Alteryx daily.

Cloudera delivers the modern platform for machine learning

and advanced analytics built on the latest open source
technologies. The world’s leading organizations trust Cloudera
to help solve their most challenging business problems by
efficiently capturing, storing, ​processing and analyzing vast
amounts of data. Learn more at cloudera.com.

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TDWI Research provides research and advice for
data professionals worldwide. TDWI Research
focuses exclusively on data management and
analytics issues and teams up with industry thought
leaders and practitioners to deliver both broad and
deep understanding of the business and technical
challenges surrounding the deployment and use
of data management and analytics solutions. TDWI
Research offers in-depth research reports, commentary,
inquiry services, and topical conferences as well
as strategic planning services to user and vendor
organizations.

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